The Company
An international manufacturer with subsidiaries in North
America, Europe, Middle East and Far East; One of the
largest in the world

The Business Incentives
Establishment central catalog for central procurement

The Goal
Streamline procurement through consolidating the product
inventory

The Task
Consolidate a product inventory of over 100,000 stock
keeping units (SKUs), stored in four different databases,
formats, and languages

The Challenge
Create a new taxonomy; aggregate, refine and standardize
the data; classify it into categories; extract product attributes;
enrich the data; identify duplicate or similar products; and
create consolidated, tabulated, normalized product data

The Team
Inquera subject domain experts: Specialists in product data quality, data governance, and taxonomy

The Tools
The Elevate suite: High-performance automated product catalog optimizer (Product Data Quality) system that transforms defective data into high-quality master data

The Results
A global, single new taxonomy with a hierarchy of categories, attributes, and attribute values; comprehensive, consistent, normalized descriptions; products were classified according
to new taxonomy

Business Benefits
Millions of dollars in saving on procurement and operation;
and more than 10% of duplicates identified in the major categories

The Case
With several factories and subsidiaries all around the world, producing similar products and using similar technology, the likelihood of duplication was very high.
The product descriptions, based on inconsistent free text, stored separately in different sites under different classification systems, were unclear, incomplete, inconsistent, and in different languages, making it impossible to find or compare identical or even similar products.
The consolidation of the product data and inventory was a mammoth task and could not be handled in-house. The company contacted Inquera and by using its unique technology and know-how the product data was refined, consolidated and new standard descriptions in any requested language were loaded back to the ERP material master.

Inquera's taxonomy experts adapted a suitable taxonomy to the company. Using the Elevate Factory all the product data was classified to the proper category. Based on the accurate and detailed classification, the company was able to analyze the spending and inventory and to prioritize the categories for refinement according the Pareto principles (i.e., 20% of categories that represent 80% of the spending).
The next step was to auto-extract the values form the free text descriptions and to assign them, normalized, to the relevant attribute – to transform the free defective text into normalized tables of attribute-values. Then, using the company consolidation strategy for each category, Elevate Factory identified the product with identical or similar functionality and recommended them as unification candidates to be approved by the company engineers. The last step was to auto-generate (based on templates) from the normalized tables, in each category, new standard descriptions (standard, long, short) in any desired language.