Net Reduces Search Time for Components from 30 Minutes to 3

At Marconi Medical Systems, standards engineers use an Internet database to get complete component specification information in three minutes, compared to the 15 to 30 minutes needed previously when they obtained this information from the manufacturer. Standards engineers are responsible for creating a database with complete specifications of all components used in the company's medical equipment. In the past, the fastest way to get this information was to call the manufacturer and ask them to fax a product data sheet. Now, they get the information from a subscription service accessed through their Internet browser. The service's database contains three million pages of data about products from 16,000 manufacturers. "It has a full text search capability, which lets us find part numbers and key words located anywhere within those millions of catalog pages," says standards engineer, Tom Toth. "That's a big improvement over other catalog vendors that just present image files of the pages, which you can't search. And what is really impressive to me is how complete the database is. I have never run into a situation where I typed in a part number and the query came back with 'Nothing found.'"

Started in 1915 as Picker International, Marconi Medical Systems is known as one of the world's leading medical imaging companies and a pioneer in the field of radiology technology. The company is organized into three business groups: Picker Medical Imaging, which designs, manufactures and markets medical diagnostic equipment including CT and MRI scanners and nuclear cameras; Picker Health Care Products, a leading distributor of supplies and accessories for the medical imaging industry and Picker Information Management, which oversees the company's offerings in teleradiology, PACS solutions and health care information systems. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, Marconi Medical Systems has revenues of more than $1.5 billion and employs more than 5,000 people.

Compiling A Component Database

Engineers in the corporate standards department at Marconi Medical Systems support the company's design and quality control efforts by compiling a detailed internal database of all components within the company's systems. In addition to identifying every component according to an internal part number, the database contains numerous additional fields, allowing the company to store detailed descriptions of each item. Some of the fields include operating parameters, dimensions, tolerances, and so on. When a design engineer is developing a new product, he gives a list of components, along with the manufacturers' names and the manufacturers' part numbers to a standards engineer. This person first checks the database to see which components are already there. For those that are not in the database, he assigns an internal part number and then goes about the task of obtaining the relevant information. Because of the complexity of the company's systems, standards engineers deal with a wide range of product categories, including everything from integrated circuits and semiconductors to plumbing fittings.

Toth estimates that he and his colleagues spend about 70 percent of their time obtaining the product information required for the database. In the past, the best option for getting this information was to go directly to the manufacturer and ask for a product data sheet. Prior to the ubiquity of fax machines, this meant waiting several days for the document to be mailed. Fax machines reduced the wait to 15 to 30 minutes. At one point, the company signed up for a CD-ROM-based catalog subscription service in the hope that having the information available on-site would speed the information-gathering process. This approach wasn't satisfactory for several reasons. First, because the information on the CD-ROM was out-of-date quickly, it had to be updated monthly. The CD-ROM system had been installed on five different networks to make the catalog service available to five different groups of design engineers in addition to the standards engineers. Updating each system each month was a time-consuming process. Another drawback to this approach was that the vendor catalog pages were TIFF images, which made it impossible to search the text. Finally, using this system meant getting up from the desk, finding the right CD-ROM, and putting it in the reader. With the growing popularity of the web, a third option for obtaining product data emerged-going to the manufacturers' web sites. This was also unsatisfactory because the available information was often more like an advertisement and did not provide descriptive specifications about the parts. Also, very few sites let a user type in a part number to quickly find the necessary product information.

Successful Alternative

The company found a highly effective alternative in a subscription service called CatalogXpress® offered by IHS, Denver, Colorado (http://www.ihs.com/CatalogXpress®/index.html). This service provides fast access to product information through an Internet browser. "I just type in the manufacturer, the part number, and a few key words, and the system comes back with several choices," says Toth. "More than 99 percent of the time, I find exactly what I'm looking for." The information is available in about three minutes, which is a substantial time savings even compared to receiving a fax. It's also faster than the CD-ROM system because the standards engineers don't have to get up from their desks to deal with the CD-ROM.

One of the reasons CatalogXpress® finds nearly every product the standards engineers search for is the extent of its database - three million catalog pages and more than 600,000 vendor sales office locations. For each catalog that IHS includes in the database, someone scans each page, then runs the file through optical character recognition software (OCR) software to make it possible to search the text. The company continues to improve its processing line, now processing catalogs around the clock to ensure that the database is up to date. Catalogs are prioritized based on actual customer usage so that frequently referenced catalogs move through the system the most rapidly. IHS is moving toward the use of .pdf files, which should further speed the process of getting new catalogs on line. As more manufacturers provide their catalogs in .pdf format, IHS can use the files directly rather than going through the two-step scanning and OCR process.

CatalogXpress®' full-text searching capability is the other reason Toth and his colleagues are able to find nearly every product they search for. Full-text searching locates key words within the complete text of the catalog pages. "The system brings back a list of vendors that have your key words on their pages. You can view every page that contains your key words," says Toth. Behind the scenes, the IHS Thesaurus, compiled from over 40 years of engineering experience, adds "intelligence" to the searches by cross-referencing similar terms. For instance, if a user typed in "fuse panels" as key words, the system would also retrieve pages containing "fuse bays." According to Toth, "There are things that I find on CatalogXpress® that I cannot locate anywhere else. If I don't have the name of a particular part, I can use the thesaurus function to locate the information in a reasonable amount of time."

The CatalogXpress® service provides standards engineers with a single source for all the standards and specification information they need. By cutting the search time from as long as 30 minutes to about three, the service has improved their efficiency enormously. In addition, they are no longer concerned with keeping catalog information up to date. "We don't use an engineer's time to upgrade the system. That's all handled by IHS," says Toth.

The design engineers at Marconi Medical Systems also have access to CatalogXpress®. They use the service when they are in the process of designing a system and need more information about certain components. Previously, they obtained this information from stacks of manufacturers' catalogs that they keep in their offices. Now that these catalogs are no longer needed, they have more space. At Marconi Medical Systems, using an Internet database to access product data has turned the up-to-30-minute wait for information into a simple, three-minute process that is effective for nearly all product searches. Since the company signed up for the CatalogXpress® subscription service, both standards engineers and design engineers now do their work more efficiently.

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