Congrats on the launch! Love seeing modern manufacturing systems.
Do you handle supplier master data management? We're seeing procurement teams struggle with duplicate vendors in their ERPs - same supplier gets entered 5 different ways, messes up spend analytics and supplier relationships.
We're building AI agents for business data cleanup (still in stealth, docs coming). Manufacturing/supply chain customers seem to have the messiest supplier data - way worse than other industries.
Curious if this is something you're thinking about for Carbon? (CTO here, happy to chat)
for the supplier problem, we just use a typeahead/combobox component.
but for raw materials, we auto-generate the ids like this: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1947682873416221184
also working on some agents: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1903047303180464586
would love to talk, i'm brad@carbon.ms
Nice! Yeah, a typeahead works to a degree. I imagine that's searching their own instance vs calling out to a standardized DB you manage?
Raw materials is definitely a different animal, so auto-generating definitely works. I know a company where that's all they do - they manually pour over supplier specs to get all the model names.
Agent approach looks super cool. I see the supplier search piece happening there.
We've mapped out ~265M+ businesses globally. We're thinking about this as a data infra angle where products can tap into our system to access all the world's businesses. We're getting requests for processing millions of ERP records to clean/standardize, plus semantic supplier search across our full dataset.
I'll shoot you an email to chat more.
thanks! look forward to talking to you
This is interesting but what about non standard items? There are plenty of cases where the raw material might theoretically have the same name, but was made with a different process by each manufacturer or the resulting item from different manufacturers has slightly diverged for various reasons.
for that we use "batch" tracking with batch properties
this is a big issue in healthcare, a chunk of my last company's revenue was doing MDM for large medtechs.
Interesting. Was that a MDM focused product for healthcare or something more general infra wise like Informatica?
I don't have much context in the healthcare space and the challenges that exist there. We've been mainly talking to people in fintech, supply chain, and sales & marketing, which is primarily where I ran into this at past roles.
the product was commercial analytics for healthcare sales teams. We worked with our customers (medical device & biotech commercial teams) to define granular patient cohorts (patients with a specific disease and specific pattern of treatment) and then analyzed provider (doctor / facility) interactions with those patients.
One onboarding problem was always - here's what I know about the doctors / facilities I care about, help me understand what I don't know. Well, what they knew was usually in a CRM, with very poor hygiene, or some ERP - dat assembled by hundreds of sales and ops people over years, sometimes decades. So generally the first step for us was to do an MDM exercise to join their data to ours.
This had a huge pay-off for both parties. For us we were able to make our product much more useful to them. For them, they now had a map of their territory they could use across multiple business units, multiple therapeutic areas (these usually operate independently and sometimes sell to the same buyers!)
I'm seeing the same opportunity/challenge in my new company, but this time focusing on the supply chain of these companies.