Actify: Redefining Product Data Intelligence for the Manufacturing Sector

Chris Jones, CEO & President

Product Data Intelligence is one of the key necessities for manufacturing companies today. However, the industry has a major skill gap. Manufacturing companies cannot afford to have expensive engineers compiling and administering product data or product information to leverage the data boom. Chris Jones, the CEO and President and the team at Actify identified this problem as the industrial black hole and used Actify’s knowledge and experience to build a Product Data Intelligence solution. Chris begins, “The information is coming from multiple databases. The whole thing about manufacturing companies is how you make all the information available to the bigger audience. Even though most of our customers have PLM systems, they tend to use it only in the engineering areas. There are many who don’t even have a management system.”

Actify helps create a data network where manufacturing organizations can view, manage, and investigate product data with CAD Visualization, Data Discovery, and Data Visualization & Dashboards. Briefing on the efficiency of the organization’s solutions, Chris says, “We have developed solutions that allow manufacturing companies to access information from multiple disparate databases, mash that information together so that they are able to see it, visualize it through dashboards or a 3D image; so, they can make intelligent business decisions.”

The company, with its Product Data Management solution, has helped firms organize data and manage important information. To harness the huge amounts of data, the firm has devised a unique technology called Pipeline Manager. It can be implemented across the globe and has the capability of mining information from varied sources of data and accumulating them together in one central location.

Chris elaborates, “The Pipeline Manager gives us several competitive advantages – it helps us deploy inexpensively and retrieve information very quickly, it can change and adopt systems very easily–making things very flexible.”

A key competitive advantage for the organization is that it doesn’t only cater to the CAD visualization needs of its clients, but also the extraction and distribution of all product design data related to a component or assembly in the most efficient manner.

Actify helps create a data network where manufacturing organizations can view, manage, and investigate product data with CAD Visualization, Data Discovery, and Data Visualization & Dashboards

With Actify’s great experience with 3-D information, the solution also allows you to recognize duplicate and similar shapes, hence giving manufacturing companies the ability to clean their existing databases of unnecessary parts, saving significant sums of money.

Citing an instance where Actify helps businesses in making faster and smarter business decisions, Chris says, “For example, one of our customers has a very simple business rule. If a component’s raw material price goes above 30 percent of the quote price, their profit margin is eroded. So, now when the engineer saves the CAD file, we extract the physical properties, the material costs, and compare it to the quote price. And, automatically alert management if their profit margin is being eroded.”

The offerings of Actify have not only helped businesses gain altitude, but also have made them proactive with their businesses. Actify’s customers now have a clearer insight into their business and operations, and new issues are now often detected automatically, with clients being notified through emails, helping them act on the issue at the very initial stage. For over two decades, Actify has been attentive to client feedback, working in close association with its clients. It has earned them the customers’ confidence and a reputation of being client-compatible. Since the release of its data discovery solution in January 2016, over 20,000 users are now making smarter & faster decisions.