I’m a bit backlogged in reporting on recent vendor briefings and this posting is an opportunity to comment on a briefing with Josh Green, CEO of Panjiva. This supplier intelligence provider offers intelligence tools available for both buyers and suppliers, and has been growing at a double-digit rate. The Panjiva platform is one where information on suppliers, supplier shipments and various customers are all aggregated in an information portal. Searching for background information related to global, country-specific or even item and customer specific criteria are supported. Examples of the application of the Panjiva tool include scenarios like searching for China based suppliers who have certain industry certifications, or supply certain industry key customers. Other search criteria might include suppliers who have had increased incidents of quality returns, or who may be in criteria for financial risk.
Early this year, Panjiva changed its pricing model from a user-based, to a subscription-based offering model. This now affords customers the ability to have no limit to the number of users that can take advantage of this intelligence platform, This change, however, presented another challenge, that being a easier means to accelerate user interaction and adoption with the platform., without having to add large numbers of customer support resources.
To respond to this need, Panjiva has now augmented its platform with ‘Google-like’ semantic search capabilities, which I had the opportunity to view in various scenario like queries. We have previously commented on this blog regarding the introduction of more sophisticated information search and business intelligence tools making their entry into supply chain processes. Technology vendor such as Endeca, Oco Business Analytics and some others have entered the supply chain landscape offering analytical information discovery tools that allow users to self-navigate utilizing their own intuitive search capabilities. We commented in February on how such tools could have been utilized in the past Toyota sudden acceleration incidents.
It was great to again view how the power of this type of technology can be harnessed specifically in supply chain and strategic sourcing process needs.
Bob Ferrari
