Emcien partners with Cognos; focuses on product configuration analytics
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 3/1/2004 7:00:00 AM
A new partnership with business intelligence software vendor Cognos is meant to enhance the front-end reporting capabilities of Emcien, a vendor offering "product-predictive forecasting" analytical tools. In a crowded market for analytics, Emcien sets itself apart by offering software that helps configure-to-order manufacturers analyze product configurations.
"You have to be judicious in building and offering the right configurations for your product because you don't want to jeopardize your product profitability," says Radhika Subramanian, CEO and chairman of Emcien.
Subramanian says the partnership with Cognos will offer standardized capabilities so "we can present data in clean reports for manufacturing intelligence." The company also partners with Embarcadero Technologies for tools that handle integration and data transfer with back-end systems. However, Subramanian adds, the uniqueness of Emcien's software lies in its algorithms and a "syntax" that enables companies to model product lines at the configuration level.
Emcien's software is said to take into account factors including total cost, pricing, demand, and product configuration detail. "Our analysis allows us to bubble up to the top best ones to maximize product line margins," she adds.
According to Subramanian, one user—a manufacturer of heavy equipment—significantly minimized inventory using Emcien's technology. "They ended 2002 with an inventory of 147 units of configurations that didn't sell," she says. "Using our technology, they ended 2003 with only four inventoried units because their units matched orders perfectly."
As features and options increase, companies struggle with product proliferation and exponential growth of product configurations, Subramanian says. The number of offered configurations can be astronomical: up to 50 million for a PC. "It's not features and options that eat into margins," she continues. "It's about paring down offered configurations based on product economics and customer demand at the configuration level."
