CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
4 May 2005
Product News
Endeca Announces New Manufacturing & Distribution Search Solutions
Endeca, a provider of Guided Navigation®, Search and Analysis solutions, announced the availability of new Manufacturing & Distribution Search Solutions-a unique combination of information retrieval applications, services expertise. Tapping Endeca's next-generation search and Guided Navigation platform and industry-specific services and best practices, the solutions help manufacturers and suppliers boost parts reuse and strategic sourcing initiatives, improve customer service, drive online sales, and reduce costs by making it easier for people to find products, parts and components information. The new solutions are the direct result of Endeca's extensive work with dozens of leading manufacturers, suppliers and business-to-business catalogers, like John Deere, Arrow Electronics, Brady, Cabot Corporation, CDW, IBM, Mouser Electronics, and Sigma Aldrich.
Manufacturers and suppliers need to understand and make accessible complicated information about a high volume of parts and components for their businesses to succeed-everywhere from their catalogs to their websites to their design systems and supply chains. However, they face information overload, as existing systems fall short when people need to find information about a part, but lack a precise part number. The new Endeca solutions change this as people can find parts and products knowing only limited information, such as attributes, dimensions or fragmentary knowledge of what they need. Whether an engineer searching for the best part to include in a new design or a customer looking for product information on a manufacturer's website, Endeca's search and Guided Navigation goes beyond the traditional search engine experience to help employees and customers quickly find what they are looking for. And this newfound capability brings cascading benefits throughout the enterprise, as it touches all of the business processes, including procurement, supply chain, parts design, and e-business.
The new solutions fall into three major categories, including:
Product Data Navigator Solutions:
Product Data (Lifecycle) Management (PDM/PLM) solutions are essential for engineering and design initiatives like parts reuse, strategic sourcing, inventory reduction, and more. But poor information retrieval, restricted access, and high seat and training costs have limited their true potential. Designed for employee and partner-facing engineering and design applications, the Endeca Product Data Navigator gives manufacturers powerful yet intuitive search and Guided Navigation capabilities to unlock these and other critical information assets-and expose this data to a wider user base. It combines the two most common means of seeking information-search and browse-into a single integrated function, giving users the ability to quickly and easily find products, parts, components and related information through a zero-training, web-based interface. With the Endeca Product Data Navigator, pre-built content adapters can combine data from multiple systems, like PLM, ERP and virtually any other information repository to create an integrated view of data from multiple silos without need for expensive and complicated information integration projects.
Product Catalog Search Solutions:
Designed to expose the full depth of business-to-business catalogs, dramatically ease customer discovery of relevant products, move sales to lower cost online channels and boost online transactions, Endeca's product search and Guided Navigation solutions support extremely large catalogs in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of SKUs. Unique features include Dynamic Merchandising, to enable simple creation and management of relevant cross-sell and up-sell promotions based on search terms and navigation paths; and ground-breaking Custom Catalogs that filter the master catalog to display unique subsets of catalog content and customer-specific pricing, eliminating the creation and maintenance of dedicated catalogs or databases for each customer.
Website Search and Navigation Solutions:
These applications are designed to make it far easier to find content available on corporate websites and partner extranets, while reducing dependence on and usage of expensive offline channels. Endeca's content search and Guided Navigation solutions connect online visitors (customers, prospects, investors, partners, job seekers, press, etc.) with the most relevant company and product information. These solutions can search content from hundreds of types of file formats and repositories, in nearly any language. Unique Content Spotlighting promotes most popular relevant content based on search terms and browse path.
"Our Manufacturing and Distribution Solutions are designed to help meet and exceed operational and e-business performance objectives, while providing a robust, flexible and scalable technology that integrates well with their current environment," said Jim Baum, president and CEO of Endeca. "By leveraging Endeca's deep, collective experience building and deploying search and navigation applications, leading manufacturers, suppliers and business-to-business cataloguers can now quickly deploy proven next-generation solutions-and realize the full potential of the information investments."
Beyond simple search engine software, Endeca Industry Solutions combine cutting-edge information retrieval applications with professional services expertise-tailored to the needs of specific vertical industries. Based on Endeca's extensive experience working with market leaders and industry visionaries, these solutions are designed to help organizations gain competitive advantages through improved productivity, reduced costs, increased revenue and superior customer service.
Endeca's Guided Navigation, Enterprise Search, and Analysis solutions help organizations integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve business problems associated with information overload. Endeca's customers include a wide range of enterprises, including retailers (Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, CompUSA, PETCO, Wal-Mart); financial services (Bank of America, MFS Investment Management, Putnam Investments); manufacturing and distribution (IBM, Arrow Electronics, and John Deere); media and publishing (World Book and IHS) and government (the Library of Congress, NASA, and the National Cancer Institute). Endeca is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More information: http://www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com .
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