Intensifying a still-nascent focus on the industrial sector, product information specialist Endeca today announced two new applications focused on discrete manufacturers.
In the words of John Andrews, Endeca’s head of industry marketing, the company is a search and information access software provider whose technology marries search with business intelligence. While Endeca traces its roots to the e-commerce revolution that closed out the last decade — it provides the smart search technology behind the websites of 40 of the top 100 e-tailers — the company has made “pretty heavy investment” in the manufacturing vertical in the past couple of years.
That investment shows up in the company’s latest applications. Both attack the much-maligned silo syndrome that has left many manufacturers with repositories of data that do not interact and, therefore, stifle efficiency.
Endeca’s new Spend Analysis offering aims to outfit procurement professionals with the data they need to make better spending decisions, Andrews told Managing Automation in an interview.
Using the Spend Analysis program, procurement workers can analyze their overall spend, and slice and dice that outlay by commodity, manufacturing program, supplier, and region. This, said Kevin Reale, Endeca’s vice president of supply chain solutions, expands the realm of analysis beyond traditional parameters of time, organization, supplier, and category/commodity group.
A company might use the application to analyze the price volatility of a fuel canister it uses in a number of its products, for instance. The Endeca offering delves into more-granular information, Reale said, by tying into PLM systems, component supplier management catalogs, and other sources of data. That data extends beyond basic top-level information into specific attributes, such as the canister’s capacity, its material composition, and its connection type. A procurement specialist might see that the company is using 25 different canister suppliers across all of its manufacturing programs, and can choose to consolidate the buy for more efficiency.
The second application to make its debut this week is Endeca’s Design for Supply offering, which is mainly the province of product engineers, according to Andrews. Design for Supply allows an engineer a better view into choices he or she might make when designing an end product. Using the Endeca application, the engineer can get a view of both part data and supplier data — for instance, the best-priced component parts might rise to the top of search results and can be filtered by which are WEEE- or RoHS-compatible and whether any are performing poorly in the field.
Both applications operate on a read-only basis; that is, the Endeca technology merely retrieves and displays the desired product- or supplier-related information. It does not act as a master data manager, and workers who intend to alter the data must return to the system of record to do so.
Asked whether product lifecycle management and product data management systems already perform these functions, Andrews graded PLM systems highly for consolidating all product data, managing workflow, and managing version control, but maintained that they do not allow for the level of information access that Endeca’s applications do.
Both applications are available now. Andrews said the cost fluctuates with the amount of data a company needs to catalog and the frequency of the applications’ use, but said implementations range from $300,000 into the millions of dollars.