Below are a few examples of Silver Creek Systems' projects.
Web Search Improvement – Leading Retailer/E-tailer
Automate Data Operations to Drive Revenue & Reduce Outsourcing Costs – Industrial Distributor
Initial PIM Load & Ongoing Governance – Global Food Supplier
Data Standardization, Cleansing & Matching – Hospital Purchasing Organization
Initial Data Standardization for New ERP Load – Energy Company
Online Channel Revenue Improvement – Industrial Distributor
PIM Clean-up & Quote Matching – Electronics Components Distributor
Online Search & Suggestion of Alternates – Office Supply Distributor
Web Search Improvement – Leading Retailer/E-tailer
An international retailer/e-tailer had the primary challenge to provide clean, attributed data for consumption into a new search tool for roughly 40,000 items across hundreds of commodity groups. The company considered using internal IT resources to extract, normalize and present attributes but determined this method to be impractical given the wide variety of products that retailer sells.
The DataLens System was selected because it can integrate directly into their search engine and deliver well-structured, standardized product data to facilitate online search and an improved customer experience.
The customer estimated that by deploying the DataLens System their average conversion rate would increase by more than 15% and average order size by more than 5% — resulting in over $50 million per year of additional revenue.
Automate Data Operations to Drive Revenue & Reduce Outsourcing Costs – Industrial Distributor
In an effort to improve decision making and optimize their supply chain to reduce inventory costs, this distributor wanted to develop a “single source of truth” using their PIM system to maintain a “consistent view” across the organization. To make this project a success, the PIM system needed to be loaded with cleaned and standardized data including the creation of normalized long descriptions — functions that can't be completed by the PIM system alone. The primary challenge was to normalize content and extract attributes for 1.3 million highly abbreviated and unclassified SKUs being stored in a number of legacy applications.
Other key project goals included:
- Developing customer quote/customer part number cross-reference capabilities.
- Classifying and maintaining UNSPSC codes across multiple product classes.
- Developing a new application — as part of their Data Governance program — that would only allow clean data to be loaded in the central data source that feeds all North American systems.
Since moving to the Silver Creek solution, the company has experienced:
- A reduction of 75% per year in outsourced services — saving up to $750,000 per year.
- An increase in employee productivity due to automating of many day-to-day labor-intensive data cleaning tasks.
Initial PIM Load & Ongoing Governance – Global Food Supplier
A global food marketing and distribution company was developing a new, Content Information Management (using a PIM database) system that would house product information from various suppliers/manufacturers and would be used to populate its online ordering system — making it easier for their customers to find and order products with high reliability.
However it became apparent that two issues threatened to both significantly delay the project and consume significant manual resources both for initial load and ongoing operations:
- Definition of the target schema (the required information in the PIM for each product class).
- Initial and ongoing transformation of inconsistent and unstructured incoming supplier data into the required PIM.
The DataLens System was selected to solve these problems with:
- Automated schema discovery (data model development and rapid design iteration).
- Automated data conversion for initial load and ongoing maintenance and governance — including classification, description standardization and attribute extraction for diverse data from many sources.
Data Standardization, Cleansing & Matching – Hospital Purchasing Organization
A hospital performance improvement group ― serving more than 1,000 member hospitals and health systems ― had the primary challenge of interpreting, cleansing, matching, and standardizing thousands of product records a week from various external suppliers against their PIM system.
Although they could achieve match rates between 60 and 95 percent through manual effort, it usually took an average of 16 person days to accomplish. Using the DataLens System on the same data set, they were able to achieve an 80 percent match in less than an hour – significantly reducing ongoing costs and turnaround time.
The new automated process changed the economics of how they serve their membership and:
- automates a significant proportion of their workload.
- allows elimination of redundant processes between departments.
- allows the introduction of innovative new services to further increase their competitive advantage.
Initial Data Standardization for New ERP Load – Energy Company
In an effort to improve buying power and optimize their supply chain to reduce inventory costs, this energy company decided to consolidate the disparate ERP systems of its six operating divisions acquired through M&A activities.
To make this data transformation project a success, the new ERP system needed to be loaded with cleaned and standardized data including vendors, manufacturers, part numbers and part descriptions. The primary challenges of this project were:
- six disparate ERP systems with different classifications schemas,
- the redundancy between the systems, and
- the redundancy within each system.
By utilizing the Silver Creek Solution to de-dupe, match and standardize their data, the customer estimated that they could reduce the number of parts records in their ERP from 400,000 to 70,000 records ― increasing their buying power with vendors and saving millions of dollars per year in surplus parts.
Online Channel Revenue Improvement – Industrial Distributor
A large industrial distributor determined that the key to their continued growth and to provide a competitive edge, they needed to dramatically improve their customers’ online and in-store experience. To do this, they would need to improve product categorization, search capabilities, better descriptions, transaction times, and order accuracy. This project would entail standardization, cleansing and enriching their product data from numerous and disparate sources.
Using the DataLens systems to provide a “single source of truth” through product standardization and cleansing, they estimated that they could achieve the following:
- 10% increase in online conversions.
- 2.5% increase in online add-on product sales.
- $2.1 million increase net profit in first year.
PIM Clean-up & Quote Matching – Electronics Components Distributor
One of the world's largest B2B distributors of electronic and electromechanical parts, with several million parts from hundreds of suppliers in its inventory, was faced with the challenge of assimilating, matching and standardizing all their product data to provide:
- A single, reliable ‘source of truth’ for their product data — the heart of their business.
- Enable matching of incoming customer requests against their PIM so that quotes could be generated.
- Enable product cross-referencing so that alternate products can be suggested.
- Product links to a variety of product documentation.
To complicate matters, the distributor received 2 million line items for quotes per month in a variety of formats. After a number of years of trying to develop their own rules-based processes, they could only achieve match rates slightly better than 50 percent.
Silver Creek System’s DataLens™ product was selected because its semantic technology’s ability to automate the standardization of product information for processing customer quote requests and matches them against the product item master.
Using the Silver Creek’s Data Service Applications, the Distributor was able to increase their product match rate by 20 percent in approximately 90 days. This, in turn, increased the company’s ability to quote match by ~200,000 items/month, resulting in millions of dollars per month in additional quotations.
Online Search & Suggestion of Alternates – Office Supply Distributor
A leading business-to-business supplier of essential office and computer products and services needed to standardize their product descriptions and extract attributes to:
- Facilitate online search.
- Identify and suggest alternative products.
- Deliver e-procurement catalogs in a variety custom forms (different classification schemes, different descriptions lengths, etc.) for their customers.
- Use attribute values for online product comparison.
Using the DataLens System, the company was able to reduce the manual effort required for these tasks as well as significantly expand the scope and speed of their operations — and deliver an improved online experience for their customers.
Going forward, the company also plans to use the DataLens System as the basis for product data Governance — monitoring the completeness of product information available from their suppliers and on their website.
