Berkeley, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 09/11/2017 --VIMANA, pk/a System Insights announced that company co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, William Sobel, will speak at SME's Digital Transformation Seminar on September 13th in Los Angeles, CA. The event will run alongside of Westec. Sobel's talk, titled 'The Impact of MaaS on the Agile Supply Chain' will begin at 2:55pm.

Is the Manufacturing industry evolving into "Manufacturing as a Service", similar to the transportation industry? Are customers requiring suppliers of goods and services to maximize the value relationships among quality, service, and price? Are manufacturers starting to plan their architecture and enabling technologies to support agile on-demand manufacturing?

Sobel will discuss the future vision of Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS), the shared use a of a networked manufacturing infrastructure. MaaS will provide access to distributed manufacturing resources to enable a highly automated and flexible production and fulfillment network while reducing the cost of the manufacturing infrastructure. To stay competitive, manufacturers need to understand these new business models and the impact of technology from design, to the shop floor, and throughout the supply chain.

Sobel will share his view of the path to agile manufacturing along with considerations for architecture and technologies that are required to enable the ecosystem of services that will characterize the capabilities and capacity of manufacturing assets. He will also share the value at each stage of the journey.

"MaaS is on the horizon, some manufacturers have already begun to embrace it, others are just starting to see the initial stages. The best way to move your manufacturing facility forward is to jump-in early, rather than trying to play catch-up," stated William Sobel, Co-Founder and CSO of VIMANA. He continued, "my talk will focus on what shops and plants need to do go get ready for MaaS and how they can jump-in and stay ahead of their competition".

Sobel recently gave a similar talk at Modern Machine Shop's inaugural Top Shops Conference in Indianapolis, IN on September 6th, 2017. The message was well received and a number of attendees noted they have started seeing the beginning of MaaS being implemented in manufacturing.

About William Sobel
As an industry thought leader on business value and systems architecture for MaaS, William Sobel brings over 25 years of experience advancing state-of-the-art software architecture. In 2005, prior to co-founding System Insights (VIMANA), Mr. Sobel was a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley working at the RadLAB teaching agile web development and researching cloud application scalability. During his employment at the university, he architected and authored the MTConnect standard for AMT (the Association for Manufacturing Technology) to address the lack of semantic industrial inter-process communication in manufacturing. As the principal author and architect of the MTConnect standard, Mr. Sobel has led the industry towards many advances in industrial semantic data collection and analytics. Through his leadership of industry and standards organizations, he is currently leading working groups that are developing the foundation for the next generation of manufacturing services and leading industry efforts to create composable federated IIoT systems for manufacturing.

About VIMANA
VIMANA's software and services provide operational transparency to plant and enterprise-wide performance so manufacturers can uncover ways to improve efficiency, quality, cycle time, cost reduction, and responsiveness to customers. VIMANA's technology fuels Industry 4.0, IIoT and Smart Manufacturing initiatives. With VIMANA's technology, The Language of Smart Manufacturing, our customers can understand their machines, draw brilliant conclusions, make informed decisions, improve manufacturing operations, and elevate performance.

VIMANA offers the leading cloud-based and on-premise predictive analytics platform for manufacturing intelligence. VIMANA's software solves the challenges many manufacturers face in their digital journey: connecting all devices, providing data flow in a consistent way, enriching and integrating data, revealing the true state of the manufacturing process, and offering analytics, visualization, communication, and collaboration solutions that inspire adoption from operators and senior leaders.

http://www.goVIMANA.com