Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Lighting Up Your Booth and Sales With MTInsight IMTS Lite

Lighting Up Your Booth and Sales With MTInsight IMTS Lite

Mar 14, 2012
MTInsight
Woody Allen once said, “90 percent of life is just showing up.” Unfortunately, that philosophy is exactly the type of thinking that some exhibitors have about preparing for trade shows. In 2012, we are seeing a major change in how exhibitors prepare for IMTS with the game changing MTInsight app called IMTS Lite. Just showing up is not nearly enough anymore.
Exhibitors have long realized it is not about the quantity of attendees showing up at their booths, but rather the quality AND the quantity.   IMTS has such a well-established and proven track record regarding attendance, that the critical pre-IMTS marketing question comes down to a simple question:
  • How can my company drive the most qualified attendees to my booth at IMTS?
If you attended any of the IMTS Exhibitor Workshops, you know that there are a number of great answers to that question, but I would argue that the best answer to that question for IMTS 2012 is the MTInsight IMTS Lite app.
I want to share just a little bit about what IMTS Lite is under the covers, but first let’s take a look at what IMTS Lite does to help IMTS exhibitors.  IMTS Lite can help you promote your booth in the 2012 show using contact information from 2010 registrations. In addition, IMTS Lite can:
  • View visitors to your booth in 2010 (Leads)
  • Find out who was at the show but who did not visit your booth (Opportunities)
  • Look at all visitors to the 2010 show (All IMTS)
  • Filter by geography, industry, product interest, buying role, job function, and plant size to narrow your results
  • Use Contact Search option to look for specific individuals or companies
  • Export your results to use in your own company database or marketing campaign
  • Import IMTS registration data directly into your CRM
Data is growing at a 40% year-over-year rate for as far as the eye can see. Jobs for those individuals who understand how to sift through and manage that data are commanding top dollar.   Business and market intelligence efforts are seeing quantifiable ROI using data.  Running applications in the cloud is starting to become the norm and not the exception. These facts are worth just a second to understand what is under the covers of the IMTS Lite app.
AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology has built IMTS Lite as an industrial class application that runs in the cloud.  Because it runs in the cloud, we can say, for all practical purposes, IMTS Lite has unlimited scalability.  If we had 1,200 exhibitors sign up for IMTS Lite tomorrow, it would be no problem whatsoever in terms of handling the requests.    Why?  We designed MTInsight from the ground up to run in the cloud.
In addition, we have teamed with a business intelligence company that runs in the cloud, and we placed all of the data in the cloud as well as all of the MTInsight applications. This cloud allows us to scale storage and processors to dynamically meet demand. We don’t need to “tell” MTInsight or the IMTS Lite app anything – it simply grows with the workload. We also ensure security by using https — the protocol that encrypts the data between your browser and the site you are speaking to. It’s used by websites that handle financial transactions, as well as other sites that want to protect their data. Sometimes you see a small lock appear on the browser bar when you are using https. 
But the real secret sauce to IMTS Lite is the decades of experience that have gone into what IMTS Lite needs to accomplish. The requirements came out of Peter Eelman’s Exhibitions Department (which was co-championed by Michelle Edmonson), AMT’s IMTS Show Committee, Mark Kennedy and Kim Brown from the MTInsight Sales and Marketing Department, as well as countless others inside and outside of AMT.  The voice of the IMTS exhibitor was heard loud and clear throughout the entire process. Pat McGibbon, AMT’s Vice President of Strategic Information and Research (SIR) and his extremely talented SIR department led the development and deployment team. This diverse group put IMTS Lite together along with a small team of consultants.
The data sources are managed by Pat’s team, which is made up of manufacturing industry experts who are statisticians, economists, researchers, mathematicians, database experts, programmers, and experts in BI. These are the talented individuals who write the analytic software that create the MTInsight dashboards, charts, reports and graphs that you see.
What is the bottom line with any show like IMTS?  Driving more qualified individuals to your booth that in turn will drive more sales and/or services for your company.   What is the best way to do that?  In my opinion, it is to sign up and use the IMTS Lite app – today!
Let MTInsight help you start your pre-show marketing campaign for IMTS 2012. Visitwww.mtinsight.org to learn more and subscribe. For questions, pricing, or to schedule a live demonstration contact Mark Kennedy (mkennedy@amtonline.org or 703-827-5220) or Kim Brown (kbrown@amtonline.org or 703-827-5223) today!

Dr. Dave Dornfeld Receives Charles F. Carter Advance Manufacturing Award


Huge congratulations to Dr. Dave Dornfeld of University at California at Berkeley (UCB) for receiving the Charles F. Carter Advance Manufacturing Award last week at the Manufacturing Technology Forum.


As is stated on Berkeley's site:

Dr. David Dornfeld, Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability at UC Berkeley, has received the Association of Manufacturing Technology's Charles F. Carter Jr. Advancing Manufacturing Award. Dr. Dornfeld is specifically recognized for his research toward advancing the understanding of burr formation and prevention, sustainable manufacturing, micro-machining, precision manufacturing and chemical-mechanical planarization.

Dave was the first professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department to become involved with MTConnect and was a huge contributor.   He is a brilliant man and a very nice guy as well.

Dave also coined "Dornfeld's Law" that I thought was so incredibly brilliant and funny that I had to blog about it.