Productivity is important. Nowadays, business environments are stressful. There are project deadlines, competitive situations, market pressures, and so on. In manufacturing companies, the situation is exacerbated by both an increase in the complexity of data and the need to access it quickly.
We started Inforbix with a vision to make data (and more specifically product data) in manufacturing companies more easily accessible and usable to everyone – a democratization of data, if you will. This, in our view, is the key component for improving productivity and innovation. I recently read an article by pandia blog, Huge problem for search in the enterprise. The following quote is important in my view…
some employees spend up to two hours per day searching for information in intranets and enterprise search tools? Or that as many as on in three of these searches are unsuccessful? As a result 40 % use the wrong information and 63 % make critical deceptions without being informed.
Sounds amazing, right? These numbers are from the report The Digital Workplace by Stephan Schillerwein from Infocentric Research, a consulting, software and research company from Switzerland. Moreover, the article provides some insight to the problem of search in the enterprise. The following observation is also very important, in my view:
One reason stated by informants among decision makers in these enterprises is that “people mostly remember where they put their files”. These same people do not think that it is important for colleagues to have access to each other’s information. So in many cases, search simply is not a priority.
I believe this view typical to manufacturing and engineering organizations. How many drawings, CAD models, BOMs are simply not available for many people because they kept in multiple silo’ed environments. The premise of the article resonate with our thoughts at inforbix: helping engineers and other people in manufacturing organizations improve their productivity by providing tools that change the way people work with data and information, we call them Inforbix Product Data Apps.
For example, Inforbix search (available in via any standard browser) and it’s mobile version (on the iPad) gives you instant access to all your drawings, models, bill of materials located in disparate data sources, vaults, locations, servers. Here’s a short video of Inforbix Search:
Conclusion. We believe one size doesn’t fit all and Google cannot solve the product data access challenges specific to manufacturing companies. Specific tools for specific tasks are what’s needed. Inforbix creates intelligent apps for intelligent data access; they understand product data by deploying product data semantic technology. And isn’t data access really the critical path for improved engineering productivity and innovation? We think so. What do you think?
Best, Oleg
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