CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
8 September 2008
Product News
Endeca Debuts Engineering and Sourcing Solutions for Discrete Manufacturing
Endeca unveiled two new information visibility solutions for engineering and sourcing professionals within discrete manufacturing companies. Endeca’s Design for Supply solution provides design engineers with 360 degree visibility into integrated part and supplier information to select parts that align with sourcing, compliance and other corporate objectives. Endeca’s Spend Analysis solution provides sourcing professionals with real-time access and analysis of disparate sourcing, parts and supplier information to identify opportunities for reducing direct materials spend, consolidating suppliers and negotiating preferred contracts. Both product introductions are part of a focused effort by Endeca to bring new information visibility solutions to aerospace and defense, automotive, high tech and industrial manufacturers. And both solutions solve long-standing challenges not addressed by today’s PLM, Spend Management, Supply Chain Management and business intelligence applications.
Each solution features a customizable web-based user experience that integrates Endeca’s search, business intelligence, and Guided Navigation® and Guided Summarization™ capabilities. These elements are used on hundreds of today’s most popular e-commerce stores and websites, thus reducing the need for training and encouraging widespread adoption. As a result, engineers and sourcing professionals can quickly browse, evaluate and drill into product and supplier data using dozens or even hundreds of attributes and criteria.
Endeca’s manufacturing solutions are built on an architecture that simplifies the integration of data from numerous source systems into a single unified index, regardless of format, structure and underlying data models. Powered by Endeca’s MDEX Engine™ technology, it enables the aggregation, querying and analysis of data from PLM (Agile PLM from Oracle, MatrixOne/Dassault, Siemens/UGS TeamCenter, PTC Windchill), ERP (SAP, Oracle’s JD Edwards), Spend Management (Ariba, Emptoris), supplier relationship management (i2/JDA, Manugistics) product catalogs, and other business critical data systems.
“Today’s manufacturers are facing dramatic shifts in consumer demand, huge increases in direct materials costs and growing pressure to identify new operational efficiencies,” said Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca. “Investments in PLM, Spend Management, ERP, and supply chain management systems have created a wealth of valuable information, but this information remains locked within these rigid, process-oriented silos. Design for Supply and Spend Analysis offer a quick path to tap into this latent potential and use information visibility to create operational and competitive advantages on a multi-million and even multi-billion dollar scale.”
More about Design for Supply
As engineers select parts and components based on desired technical attributes, they often have little visibility into the ultimate impact on sourcing and supply chain objectives. This creates an iterative process between engineers and sourcing professionals -- ultimately responsible for approving these selections -- that lengthens the overall design process and can have a direct impact on cost, margins and quality. Design for Supply provides engineers with new ways to find, explore and evaluate parts and components while seamlessly incorporating information on preferred suppliers, product lifecycle, compliance, or other characteristics to guide discovery and selection and steer decisions that fit both engineering and sourcing goals. As a result, manufacturers can embed collaboration between sourcing and engineering that reduces the iterative process, mitigates downstream supply chain risk, and ensures cost, margin and quality benefits through strategic sourcing.
Features include:
Guided Navigation and Summarization capabilities expose meaningful tradeoffs to encourage best part/component selection, quickly and easily, without requiring expert knowledge of parts and component libraries and other underlying enterprise systems
Zero-training interface provides single-click, interactive visibility into all design considerations including technical, supplier, hazardous material, and other attributes enabling engineers to incorporate downstream considerations into component choices and speeding time to market
Full range of familiar filtering capabilities, including search, dimensional filters, range filters with full Boolean support, make it possible to reach any subset of data quickly and easily
Content spotlighting and sorting controls empower commodity teams to highlight best reuse and sourcing candidates within any query
Flexible data model significantly reduces implementation time and adapts to future changes while consolidating large volumes of structured and unstructured information from multiple repositories
SOA interfaces offer simple integration with existing systems
More about Spend Analysis
Sourcing professionals are faced with the challenging task of identifying and executing on parts and component consolidation efforts to rationalize spend across divisions, programs and platforms. To be successful, they need to gain visibility into all the various sourcing systems to uncover the best opportunities for cost advantage. In addition to direct cost, they need to understand supplier characteristics, supply chain considerations, design usage and technical attributes in order to make intelligent tradeoffs. With the number of systems involved, getting this kind of visibility can take months using existing systems, with the direct impact of millions and even billions in unrealized savings. Endeca’s Spend Analysis solution provides unparalleled visibility into this same information, across all relevant enterprise systems, empowering the sourcing team to explore a range of tradeoffs interactively, without IT intervention, leading to quick insights and significant savings.
Features include:
Guided Navigation and Summarization capabilities deliver interactive business intelligence across full spectrum of relevant structured and unstructured information, leading to quick sourcing insights
Zero-training interface provides single-click, 360 degree visibility into sourcing and design considerations making it straightforward to weigh business tradeoffs and make optimal strategic sourcing decisions
Full range of familiar filtering capabilities, including search, dimensional filters, and range filters with full Boolean support making it easy to isolate any question without expensive IT intermediation
Native indexing of record-level data, making it possible to immediately gain insight into component-level spend from any aggregate BI view or explore arbitrary subsets of information without IT support or custom one-off data marts
Dynamically adapts to enterprise-specific classification and attribute schemes.
Flexible data model significantly reduces implementation time and adapts to future changes while natively consolidating large volumes of structured and unstructured information from multiple repositories
SOA interfaces offer simple integration with existing systems
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