Complexity management
with product mining

The main features

Enterprise Digital Twin

The data model of the Soley Product Mining Platform uses the granular data of the ERP system contained in the basic tables to generate an Enterprise Digital Twin of the manufacturing company. By also importing control parameters, for example, Product Mining maps the entire intelligence of the ERP system so that manual checks and corrections of the analysis results are not necessary.

At the center of the Enterprise Digital Twin are the parts lists of products and variants. In addition, there are purchasing and sales documents, suppliers and customers, inventories, work plans, forecasts, etc. as well as
master data on products, materials and customers. In numerous internal calculation steps, the data relations are enriched with analysis results, KPIs, segmentations and classifications in order to map the operational, tactical and strategic decision-making levels in the Enterprise Digital Twin.

Value Pattern Technology

Value patterns are predefined, use case-related patterns consisting of product properties, parameters and relationships. They accelerate the decision-making process and increase the effectiveness of the derived measures.

The value patterns are used to automatically analyze millions of dependencies between products, customers, components and suppliers. As a result, the algorithm quantifies worthwhile potential and high risks and suggests prioritized recommendations: Which products are suitable for substitution? The prices of which variants can be increased? Which portfolio adjustments have particularly high margin potential?

Manufacturing companies can also develop their own value patterns in order to take company-specific product characteristics and value chains into account in the automatic recommendations for action or to open up new use cases on the platform.

Decision Intelligence Technology

The Decision Board is the collaborative center of the platform and brings together all participants at strategy
and detail level. The recommendations of the value patterns and individually submitted decision proposals are processed jointly. Impact analysis and drill-down provide decision-relevant information at all levels.

What (side) effects will your decisions have? With the Impact Explorer, the Soley Product Mining Platform offers the functional areas involved the opportunity to efficiently and precisely evaluate the effects of upcoming decisions in advance.

Seamless integration into the decision-making process means that complex dependencies for large quantities of products, components, customers and suppliers can be tracked step by step. Questions and concerns are quickly clarified during the process, without the need for time-consuming use of Excel or detailed reviews of SAP. Instead of time-consuming discussions, the team can concentrate on what makes the company successful: making more good decisions.

Product mining in complexity management

Effective complexity management is the sum of numerous good individual decisions. In this sense, product mining can be the decisive building block for making complexity management in manufacturing companies more efficient and effective.

How can product mining be used specifically to increase the growth, resilience, innovative strength, sustainability and profitability of manufacturing companies? Let’s take another look at the four fields of action of complexity management.

Field of action 1: Analysis

No more manual intervention required: parts list analysis

BOMs are complex and ambiguous in common ERP systems and often cannot be easily resolved. This applies to SAP in particular. Configurable products in particular often contain complex rules for generating BOMs. The data model in Soley Product Mining is able to automatically read in all standard BOM structures of common ERP systems as well as many individual structures and make them available for analysis using value patterns without manual intervention.

Comparison with the best: Value Patterns

The value patterns available on the platform are based on best practices from successful manufacturing companies and form the essence of many product mining use cases. Recommendations for action outside the comfort zone allow new potentials to be realized. This ensures that the primary focus is on those decisions that have a particularly high potential for success.

Sales Boost from the sales data: Shopping cart analyses

Based on parts list analyses and value patterns, sales potential can be identified and leveraged: In which product categories can cross-selling performance be improved and how? What do the typical shopping baskets of the customer groups look like? The in-depth shopping basket analyses in Product Mining generate more insights into the purchasing behavior of customers and open up additional sales potential.

Field of action 2: Portfolio management

Maintain focus: The core business

Product Mining extends the typical ABC-XYZ analysis and also examines internal platform synergies. This results in a clear division into preferred products, extended products and special products, each with a different price point and delivery availability. Preferred products with high delivery availability help to survive in volatile growth markets and enable high economies of scale in purchasing and production. Complexity-driving special products can be specifically selected for make-or-buy decisions.

Farewell without the pain of separation: product phase-outs

At the touch of a button, Product Mining can be used to identify the discontinued products with the highest savings potential and the lowest sales risk. For this purpose, the cost-benefit balances of all products are calculated on the basis of sales development, exclusive parts, suppliers and shopping basket relationships.

Users always have an overview of which customers, suppliers, components and production resources would be affected and can make decisions based on reliable data. Conflicting objectives between product management and sales are resolved in a collaborative and fact-based manner and documented transparently.

With a regional product phase-out, the product portfolio can also be adapted to regional market conditions. And phasing out ballast products in a specific region specifically reduces inventory costs and increases delivery capability.

Exploit upward air: The pricing

Product mining is used to identify products for price increases as well as inconsistent or disadvantageous price and discount trends. Profitability, product-customer relationships, indirect sales and internal complexity are taken into account.

By pricing in the complexity and opportunity costs of products to a greater extent, the margin can also be increased. The new pricing policy is used to steer the customer base towards the preferred products.

Increase resilience: Risk minimization

With product mining, manufacturing companies screen the entire product portfolio for sales volatility as well as the number of exclusive parts and exclusive suppliers per product. This results in a risk assessment for all products. This ensures that particularly sales-relevant products remain available with multi-sourcing approaches. It also clearly shows where expensive warehousing is worthwhile in the long term.

Field of action 4: Employee involvement

Working together smoothly: Collaboration

Corporate decisions are made by consensus. However, when it comes to decisions critical to the success of complexity management, there are often conflicting interests. The functional areas involved are also often stuck in their data silos. Product Mining unties the knot in the decision-making process and takes the discussion to a fact-based level. The different interests can be quantified and thus weighed up against each other in a way that is comprehensible to everyone thanks to the uniform evaluation basis. Communication within the team is specifically directed towards the decision by the platform.