SANTA CLARA, California, April 11, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) market for the chemicals industry, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Northwest Analytics, Inc. (NWA) with the 2016 North America Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Leadership. NWA has overtaken its peers with NWA Focus EMI®, a highly collaborative, flexible, scalable, and database-agnostic real-time analytics solution. By transforming data into actionable information and ensuring overall improvement in plant performance and process, NWA Focus EMI helps manufacturers gain a competitive edge. It has further distinguished itself by enhancing user experience through role-based displays, real-time dashboards, analytics-based visual alarms, and interactive analysis tools.

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The NWA Focus EMI boasts a broad set of functionalities that reduce process downtime, while improving yields and quality of companies. Redefining the manufacturing intelligence space, NWA Focus EMI employs direct, fast, and simple data-source connections to numerous existing process databases such as process historians, laboratory information management systems (LIMS), and plant floor systems such as manufacturing execution systems (MES).

"Significantly, NWA Focus EMI eliminates the need for data duplication and data storage redundancy by using industry-standard interfaces," said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Sankara Narayanan. "It aids offline problem solving and process capability analysis in addition to offering advanced real-time manufacturing analytics, providing companies with a new level of decision-making support for the timely detection and prevention of potential process issues."

Being a highly configurable, off-the-shelf (COTS) solution, NWA Focus EMI reduces the costs and time associated with installations, implementations, upgrades, and system support. Its user-centric, rather than expert-centric, approach allows chemical manufacturers to enjoy improved speed and ease of operation without any custom programming.

NWA Focus EMI's flexibility and user friendliness not only improve system performance, but also support the seamless, systematic, and efficient handling of larger numbers of data sources as customers grow. This, in turn, enables customers to scale easily and grow as their businesses evolve across lines and plants or at the enterprise level, in line with emerging market trends.

"NWA works closely with customers to enhance its service propositions, starting from full plant implementation and support to user education," noted Sankara Narayanan. "It has a huge competitive advantage in its ability to rapidly deploy its solutions in a single plant or across multiple plants, enabling pilot projects to be up and running in only three to five days and full implementation in only one to three weeks, and one to two rollouts a month in a multi-plant environment."

The high level of customer satisfaction and loyalty towards NWA Focus EMI is evident in the company's client base expanding to more than 3,000 active customers worldwide. It has attracted top-tier companies from a range of industries including chemicals, food, oil and gas, packaging, life sciences, materials, and pharmaceuticals. No competing solution operates across such a wide range of verticals or has a customer base comparable to that of NWA. This validation has strengthened NWA's position in the North American and global markets and will ensure its continued success in the coming years.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has developed a comprehensive product line that caters to the breadth of the market it serves. The award recognizes the extent to which the product line meets customer base demands, the overall impact it has in terms of customer value, as well as increased market share.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.