IBM’s research division unveiled new software that helps car
manufacturers and fleet owners sift through a glut of data about their
vehicles, sniff out trends and improve warranty coverage.
Called Quality Insight Solution, the software helps workers in the automotive industry search for
structured and unstructured data stored on anything from corporate databases
to personal computers.
This is a bigger task than it may seem.
Information about vehicles and fleets is gathered in various forms, as
warranty claims, maintenance records, call center logs, repair requests and
in online chat rooms and blogs.
The problem is that such information, 90 percent of which is text-based, is
not
put into a central repository and must be searched manually. This is
time-consuming and sets users up for mistakes, said Larry Lieberman,
research
manager for IBM’s automotive industry division.
“If you could somehow mine through the unstructured data and combine it with
the information from structured data and do analytics against that, you
could discover some new insights,” Lieberman said, explaining his group’s
hypothesis.
Quality Insight will bring together information from a
variety of sources into a common database, and then develop a sort of
dictionary of terms that will help
the system find specific files or recurring patterns, said Lieberman.
Ultimately, this will help automakers and fleet owners, which deal with a
lot of money, better predict the performance of their vehicles. For example,
automakers might identify which parts are most likely to fail given the
expected wear and tear on a particular vehicle model. This is one way the
software can help solve some problems in the supply chain.
The new software comes at a time when warranty claims are costing the market
nearly $14 billion per year in the U.S., according to Linda Ban, global
automotive lead for IBM. This works out to $700 per vehicle and shaves off
one to 3 percent of total automotive revenues.
“That has a ripple effect on the total automotive industry, because the OEMs
are now pushing some of those warranty costs they have to pay down to the
suppliers and vendors that provide them with design, development and
production for components that go onto the vehicle,” Ban said in an
interview.
The product, which will be priced based on deployment size, is a combination
of IBM’s WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition and the
Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). UIMA is IBM’s
initiative
to create applications that can process text within documents and other
unstructured content sources, interpreting their facts.
The software is being sold through IBM’s Business Consulting Services, and
will include perks from Big Blue’s DB2 Content Manager and DB2 Warehouse,
along
with WebSphere Portal middleware.
