Cloud Product Data Solution Supports Manufacturing

By DE Editors

Inforbix LLC (Chestnut Hill, MA) has announced Inforbix Product Data Apps, a cloud-centric service for small and large manufacturing companies that is intended to help engineers, project managers, and other team members find, re-use, and share product data from disparate sources and file types quickly and easily. A new service, Inforbix, offers for immediate deployment two apps: Inforbix Search for retrieving relevant product data and Inforbix Tables for configuring and presenting product data. Inforbix is offered on a low-cost annual subscription fee basis.

Image courtesy of Inforbix LLC.

“Money and time are wasted because most product data management professionals cannot locate the specific information needed without a manual search,” said Oleg Shilovitsky, co-founder and chief executive officer of Inforbix, in a press statement. “Our system makes it easy for an engineer to pinpoint designs, specifications, and even quality control data with a mouse click. We open these information silos and put the high-value information in a form that eliminates time and most of the frustration associated with fast-cycle product design.”

To accomplish this, Inforbix locates and pulls together product engineering data from multiple sources, systems, and file types. Using next-generation semantic technology, Inforbix is said to make sense of data by automatically reconciling information sources and applications. Rather than duplicate the functions already available in your CAD or data management system, Inforbix brings order to the volume and complexity of product data through first indexing then providing a product data semantics capability across all sources of manufacturing product data, including CAD files, BOMs, Excel worksheets, and PDFs.

Product data semantics is key to the company’s application of search technologies, described by the company as “a decisive element of Inforbix” because they provide “users with greater flexibility and granularity in the manufacturing domain.” Unlike generic enterprise search solutions, explains the company, its technology “implements product data semantics within a manufacturing context.” This approach makes it possible for Inforbix to infer relationships between disparate sources of product data automatically, which, in turn, can provide users with both the data they need and the ability to discover useful data they are not aware of. Additionally, because Inforbix “understands” product data in the context of CAD files, BOMs, assemblies, and other manufacturing-specific data sources, search results are presented in meaningful ways for engineers, according to the company.

Inforbix describes its solution as responding to five customer requirements:

1. As a cloud-based solution, Inforbix is ready to use quickly and reduces IT complexity
2. Inforbix works with existing processes without requiring engineers to change their design workflows
3. Single-screen access to product data regardless of the user’s or the data’s location
4. Information can be found, reused, and shared efficiently
5.  No training or ongoing maintenance.
 

Inforbix is a web-based data consumption solution. It’s offered with several yearly price plans. All plans provide for an unlimited number of users and offer identical levels of customer support. The entry-level plan, capable of indexing a single project containing up to 20,000 files, is free. On the Inforbix website, an example company with 200,000 files priced out “at most” $7,560 year.

For more information on Inforbix visit its website at www.inforbix.com.

Take a tour of Inforbix.

Learn more about the Inforbix technology.

See a video of on Inforbix Search.

See a video of on Inforbix Tables.

Get an overview of Inforbix apps.

Register to begin a free entry-level Inforbix subscription.

See why DE‘s editors selected Inforbix as their Pick of the Week.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.