Endeca Announces New Manufacturing & Distribution Search Solutions

From: Endeca Technologies
Published: Thu May 05 2005


LONDON, England, May 5, 2005 ¡V Endeca, the leading provider of online Guided Navigation„µ, Search and Analysis solutions, today announced the availability of new Manufacturing & Distribution Search Solutions -- a unique combination of information retrieval applications, services expertise.

Tapping Endeca¡¦s next-generation search and Guided Navigation platform and industry-specific services and best practices, the solutions help manufacturers and suppliers boost parts reuse and strategic sourcing initiatives, improve customer service, drive online sales, and reduce costs by making it easier for people to find products, parts and components information. The new solutions are the direct result of Endeca¡¦s extensive work with dozens of leading manufacturers, suppliers and business-to-business cataloguers, like John Deere, IBM, Arrow Electronics, Brady, Cabot Corporation, CDW, Mouser Electronics, and Sigma Aldrich.

Manufacturers and suppliers need to understand and make accessible complicated information about a high volume of parts and components for their businesses to succeed -- everywhere from their catalogues to their websites to their design systems and supply chains. However, they face information overload, as existing systems fall short when people need to find information about a part, but lack a precise part number. The new Endeca solutions dramatically change this as people can find parts and products knowing only limited information, such as attributes, dimensions or fragmentary knowledge of what they need.

Whether it is an engineer searching for the best part to include in a new design or a customer looking for product information on a manufacturer¡¦s website, Endeca¡¦s search and Guided Navigation goes beyond the traditional search engine experience to help employees and customers quickly find what they are looking for. And this newfound capability brings cascading benefits throughout the enterprise, as it touches all of the business processes, including procurement, supply chain, parts design, and e-business.

The new solutions fall into three major categories, including:

Product Data Navigator Solutions:

Product Data (Lifecycle) Management (PDM/PLM) solutions are essential for engineering and design initiatives like parts reuse, strategic sourcing, inventory reduction, and more. But poor information retrieval, restricted access, and high seat and training costs have limited their true potential. Designed for employee and partner-facing engineering and design applications, the Endeca Product Data Navigator gives manufacturers powerful yet intuitive search and Guided Navigation capabilities to unlock these and other critical information assets ¡V and expose this data to a wider user base. It combines the two most common means of seeking information ¡V search and browse ¡V into a single integrated function, giving users the ability to quickly and easily find products, parts, components and related information through a zero-training, web-based interface. With the Endeca Product Data Navigator, pre-built content adapters can combine data from multiple systems, like PLM, ERP and virtually any other information repository to create an integrated view of data from multiple silos without need for expensive and complicated information integration projects.

Product Catalogue Search Solutions:

Designed to expose the full depth of business-to-business catalogues, dramatically ease customer discovery of relevant products, move sales to lower cost online channels and boost online transactions, Endeca¡¦s product search and Guided Navigation solutions support extremely large catalogues in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of SKUs. Unique features include Dynamic Merchandising, to enable simple creation and management of relevant cross-sell and up-sell promotions based on search terms and navigation paths; and ground-breaking Custom Catalogues that filter the master catalogue to display unique subsets of catalogue content and customer-specific pricing, eliminating the creation and maintenance of dedicated catalogues or databases for each customer.

Website Search and Navigation Solutions:

These applications are designed to make it far easier to find content available on corporate websites and partner extranets, while reducing dependence on and usage of expensive offline channels. Endeca¡¦s content search and Guided Navigation solutions connect online visitors (customers, prospects, investors, partners, job seekers, press, etc.) with the most relevant company and product information. These solutions can search content from hundreds of types of file formats and repositories, in nearly any language. Unique Content Spotlighting promotes most popular relevant content based on search terms and browse path.

¡§Our Manufacturing and Distribution Solutions are designed to help meet and exceed operational and e-business performance objectives, while providing a robust, flexible and scalable technology that integrates well with their current environment,¡¨ said Jim Baum, president and CEO of Endeca. ¡§By leveraging Endeca¡¦s deep, collective experience building and deploying search and navigation applications, leading manufacturers, suppliers and business-to-business cataloguers can now quickly deploy proven next-generation solutions ¡V and realize the full potential of the information investments.¡¨

Endeca Industry Solutions

Beyond simple search engine software, Endeca Industry Solutions combine proven cutting-edge information retrieval applications with professional services expertise -- tailored to the unique needs of specific vertical industries. Based on Endeca¡¦s extensive experience working with market leaders and industry visionaries, these solutions are designed to help organizations gain competitive advantages through improved productivity, reduced costs, increased revenue and superior customer service.

About Endeca
Endeca¡¦s award-winning Guided Navigation, Enterprise Search, and Analysis solutions help organizations integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve business problems associated with information overload. Endeca¡¦s customers include a wide range of enterprises, including retailers (Tesco, Comet, Littlewoods, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, CompUSA); financial services (Bank of America); manufacturing and distribution (IBM and John Deere); media and publishing (World Book) and government (the Library of Congress, NASA, and the National Cancer Institute). Endeca is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More information: www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com.


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Endeca, Endeca InFront, Endeca Navigation Engine and Guided Navigation are registered trademarks, and Endeca ProFind and Endeca Latitude are trademarks of Endeca Technologies, Inc. All other product and service names mentioned herein are or may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies or organizations.

Contacts:
In USA - Craig VerColen
Endeca
617-577-7999
cvercolen@endeca.com

In UK - Paul Calderwood
Kingswood Public Relations
020 8763 2241
kingswoodmktg@btinternet.com

Company: Endeca Technologies
Contact Name: Paul Calderwood
Contact Email: kingswoodmktg@btinternet.com
Contact Phone: +44 20 8763 2241

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