Case Studies

Below are a number of case studies that highlight some of the most interesting challenges our customers have posed to us through the years. Each example provides a detailed analysis of how XSB, Inc.'s innovative solutions were utilized to overcome these challenges.

Click a title below to jump to that Case Study.

The Challenge:
Inefficient spend across multiple manufacturing plants dramatically increases the cost of procuring Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) items. This large Pet Food manufacturer maintains four plants across the United States, each with their own unique item master database. We found that Maintenance Items were described differently in each of the four plants and were often assigned different stock number in each plant’s database. Similarly, key strategic suppliers describe equivalent items in different ways. The inconsistencies caused a loss of visibility into cross-plant stock room inventory analysis and caused the customer to purchase the same part from different vendors in inefficient lot sizes. The challenge was to develop a Coherent View® across all of the customer's stock rooms and the supply chain to enable specification based identification of items and their equivalents.

The Solution:
XSB, Inc.'s automated data management solutions generate a Master Data File of:

  • Standardized manufacturer and catalog vendor names and part numbers;
  • Product descriptions categorized to a proprietary taxonomy;
  • Extracted and standardized product technical attributes.

Intelligent agents continuously mine the Web catalogs of strategic vendors automatically updating the master data file with new products. The XSB WEAVE® Supply Chain Optimization solution enables procurement specialists to search for and compare products based on their attributes.

The Benefits:

  • A standardized and structured view across the supply chain and stock room simplifies product selection/substitution and price comparison.
  • Duplications in inventory can quickly be identified and incidents of overstocking reduced.
  • Specification based spend analysis reduces total costs.

The Challenge:
10,000 hospitals in the United States Health Care system spend nearly $1 trillion annually. It is estimated that there is $11 Billion in wasteful spending each year. The Health Care Supply Chain consists of approximately 26,000 vendors with inconsistent product descriptions and definitions; in fact, 60% of surgical supplies do not even carry a bar code. Spend analysis is further complicated by the poor quality of hospital procurement data. XSB was tasked by this consulting firm with one of the largest healthcare supply chain management practices in the world to develop and implement a data and catalog management solution for their healthcare supply chain practice. The challenge was to develop a Coherent View® of spend across hospitals of varying size and this complex supply chain.

The Solution:
XSB, Inc.'s Ontology Directed Classification and Extraction (ODC and ODE) tools organize and extract critical information from poorly structured text and present it in a standardized and structured Coherent View® database. Product spend is categorized to product class and by organization peer group.

The Benefits:

  • The standardized Coherent View® enables efficient searches, attribute-based product comparisons and on-demand spend analysis across both clients and the supply chain.
  • Inefficient spend can be identified and mapped down to the product specification level.
  • Alternate sources for good and services can quickly be identified for strategic sourcing solutions.

The Challenge:
The DoD EMALL is an on-line electronic commerce portal that allows registered Government users to shop for, and order, a large variety of finished goods from DLA supply centers and commercial vendor catalogs. The EMALL includes over 1200 commercial vendor catalogs and over 14 million off-the-shelf commercial products. Sales in the last fiscal year were over $0.5 Billion dollars, making the EMALL one of the largest electronic marketplaces in the world. This fast growing portal adds several new vendor catalogs each week.

Vendors represent information about similar products differently, and data quality varies greatly from vendor to vendor. Large portions of the aggregated EMALL catalog data can be characterized as inconsistent, incomplete, and at times redundant. This environment makes product searches significantly less effective and results in excessive spend. The challenge was to create a Master Data File of the EMALL aggregated catalog to connect EMALL customers with the information they need to purchase products, and to make it easier for EMALL personnel to manage the content on the portal.

The Solution:
XSB used its Xtractica® solution to standardize the poorly structured text in the EMALL vendor catalogs. This generated a Master Data File for the entire EMALL. The MDF identifies equivalent items, classifies product descriptions and extracts and standardizes attributes and values. The system was able to eliminate duplicate and misleading records to make product searches more meaningful for EMALL customers.

The Benefits:

  • The Master Data File simplifies the process of cross catalog searching and product comparison for EMALL customers.
  • Standardization of manufacturer's names and part numbers alone has resulted in a two-fold reduction in the number of unique items and could potentially save at least 10% in customer spend.
  • Standardized content enables EMALL managers to quickly analyze spend across suppliers by item class to determine where commercial catalog coverage is meeting customer needs and what categories of products would benefit by soliciting additional suppliers.
  • This solution easily scales as the DoD EMALL grows.

The Challenge:
The DoD EMALL is an on-line electronic commerce portal that allows Government buyers to shop for, and order, a large variety of finished goods from DLA supply centers and commercial vendor catalogs. The EMALL includes over 1200 commercial vendor catalogs and over 14 million off-the-shelf commercial products. Sales in the last fiscal year were over $0.5 Billion dollars, making the EMALL one of the largest electronic marketplaces in the world. The market potential for any EMALL vendor is huge; however, this Office Supply Vendor’s sales through the EMALL portal were marginal. We were tasked with providing an in-depth DoD market analysis of the vendor’s catalog in order to help them better focus their DoD marketing strategy.

The Solution:
A large part of DoD procurement is done by National Stock Numbers (NSNs). The XSB Warwick Market Analysis tool is used to standardize and match product manufacturer's names and part numbers in the customer's catalog to approved NSN items that the DoD procures. This produces an item-by-item spend analysis and total spend summary for government purchases of NSNs that matched items in the customer's catalog. This report quantified the potential market for the goods and services they sell and identified buying and spending trends in the government marketplace. In addition, we identified the total DoD EMALL spend for the parts in the customer's catalog, their sales volume, and a one year part-by-part sales assessment of their catalog – including the number of transactions, product and sales amount; and total market size for matching parts.

The Benefits:

  • By matching the vendor's catalog to approved NSNs that the government buys, we were able to help the customer quantify the potential market for the goods and services they sell and tailor their product offerings to increase their presence in high demand areas.
  • The matching process identified data quality issues in the customer's catalog such as items that had missing or invalid part numbers or manufacturer names.
  • The process also helped the customer to validate their pricing strategy and helped pinpoint products that were outperforming the competition as well as those that had lack-luster sales.

The Challenge:
This global supplier of electronic parts and components maintains a vast catalog of available parts aggregated from multiple manufacturer Web sites and product data sheets. The customer was still using a predominantly manual process to update their parts catalog and database each time they added a new manufacturer to their catalog, or new products or specs were made available. This process required a great deal of manual data processing which is prone to errors and is very costly to maintain. The challenge was to automate the catalog content aggregation process to reduce the costs and friction involved in updating and maintaining their catalog.

The Solution:
XSB, Inc.'s XRover® intelligent agents were used to automate much of the catalog aggregation process by mining multiple manufacturer Web sites to retrieve manufacturer product data sheets. These data sheets were then processed using XSB's Ontology Directed Extraction tool to extract and standardize product data so that it could be autonomously integrated into the customer's catalog.

The Benefits:

  • A standardized and structured vendor catalog that can be automatically updated whenever new products or specs are released by the manufacturer.
  • Reduction in manual labor needed to aggregate and maintain the vendor catalog reduces overall costs and errors associated with catalog maintenance.