- Deployments:Do you have multiple systems deployed in different customer environments?
- Financial Metric: Number of systems deployed and generating revenue. Different regions? Different customer environments?
- Why? Demonstrating performance in the lab or factory is quite different from sustained performance in a customer environment.
- High Operational Availability: The system must work, with limited service / maintenance requirements. What is your system performance history measured by availability, interventions, OEE%?
- Financial Metric: Operating cost per system deployed.
- Why? If your system requires substantial service or OpEx to meet your agreed upon SLA (service-level agreement), your costs will grow disproportionately with your systems in the field and your business will not achieve operating leverage, at best. At worst, your customers won’t purchase additional systems.
- Consistent Accuracy and Performance: The system must be accurate, with consistent output.
- Quantitative metric: What % of the time are your systems in compliance with your customers’ contracted SLAs?
- Why? Automation without autonomy doesn’t work.
- Easy Implementation: Installing automation typically results in downtime, less revenue, and more costs. Straightforward implementation enables an easier sale, faster bookings conversion, and fewer costs.
- Financial Metric: CARR to ARR conversion and implementation costs relative to total system cost.
- Why? You can’t eat CARR — bookings are easy, especially when your customer typically pays for the system at the SAT (site acceptance test).
- Generalizable: If you’re lucky, your customer requirements will be 80% standardized and 20% customized. A static system will require a complete redesign to accommodate customization.
- Qualitative metric: The number of different customers, sites, and environments you have deployed systems.
- Why? Generalizable systems combined with easy implementation will enable rapid scaling.
- Deployments → How many systems are in the field? How long? Different customer environments?
- High Availability → Show me system performance. How do you measure performance? OEE? Uptime?
- Performance → Do your systems meet and exceed the customer’s performance expectations? How often are you out of compliance with your customer’s contracted SLAs?
- Scalability and Generalizability → Did you build projects for individual customers or did you build a generalizable product for industries? How many field operations / engineers do you have relative to systems deployed? How quickly can you deploy a system? Time to value?
