Executives may be used to calculating profits per quarter, but how many can tell you manufacturing profits per minute? That's exactly the metric Maxager Technology Inc. provides with the latest update of its enterprise profit optimization (EPO) software. Maxager 7.5, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, allows executives to calculate not only margins on each product, but also to figure in production run-rate data for each product to calculate what Maxager calls the velocity of profits. This enables managers to optimize product flows and capacity utilization. With 7.5, that measurement has become far more granular.

The idea behind EPO solutions is that not all high-margin products produce what shareholders care about most–high returns on assets. By expanding beyond a margin-only approach to include velocity of profits, companies can more accurately track ROA and may well discover that their lowest margin product that can be produced quickly actually provides the best ROA. "The concept of profitability is huge for companies and profits per minute is yet another perspective from which to view that profitability," observes AMR Research analyst John Hagerty. "Maxager 7.5 also provides a lot more visualization [through its dashboard] to allow business leaders to figure out how to deploy resources to get the highest velocity of profits."

The dashboard offers unique profit waterfall charts that illustrate revenue and cost components of product-line profitability. With a profits-per-minute analysis, the solution provides a common metric for sales, marketing, finance and production to use when considering improvements to operational efficiency.