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Home > Resource Center > Case Studies > Product Development

I2 / ASPECT PARTS CATALOG REPLACEMENT

Convergence has replaced i2 parts catalog solutions with companies in the aerospace and electronics industries. We replaced the same i2 system at different companies yet the implementations were quite different. This case study describes the shared issues our customers had with i2 parts catalog, the benefits they realized working with Convergence and the process we followed to effectively migrate them to our solution. Demonstrated benefits include:

Reduction in the amount of time spent working on data issues 90%
Reduction in the cost of system 200%
Improvement in performance (editing and searching) 70%

Download a PDF version of this product development case study

Typical issues with i2 Parts Catalogs reported by our customers.

One of the biggest challenges using i2 parts catalog has to do with data maintenance; making changes in this parts catalog can be very tedious if not an impossible task. As a result our customers were not able keep up with the changes they needed and their user community became increasingly disinterested in using their i2 parts catalog as over time it become less relevant to their operations.

Most custom built or legacy systems like i2 become out of date if they are not regularly upgraded to the latest application and database technologies. These dated systems cannot provide the ease of use or high performance needed when retrieving data for editing or just searching for items. When this happens these systems become difficult to support, hard to integrate with other systems, hard to scale and most importantly less relevant to current business requirements.

The benefits of a Convergence based parts catalog versus an i2 Parts Catalog

Convergence’s DFR database architecture makes both standard data maintenance and major changes simple to do. DFR offers a user-friendly interface where most operations can be accomplished in a few simple steps (drop and drag) supported by a flexible database with table structures that makes even major data model changes easy to do. DFR enables these changes without sacrificing data integrity with its built-in workflow and simple user security model.

DFR offers a modular architecture that separates the data in the database from the search engine. The modular architecture makes deployment of software updates (dropins) that meet specific business needs easy to accomplish. Convergence realizes each customer has different needs; both our API and our dropin architecture allow us to replace existing i2 legacy systems without losing our customers’ critical custom features. Our technology enables high performance for our users as well, whether you’re retrieving 3 million attribute values for editing or searching a large database for one specific item....tasks like these are completed in seconds.

Process for migrating from i2 to your new Convergence architecture.

Moving data from your old legacy parts catalog like i2 to convergence’s system is quite easy. Convergence has mastered migrating data (including taxonomies) from i2; where millions of items can be moved in a short period of time. This migration experienced coupled with our simple installation process allows us to get new customers up and running in no time. Once your data is migrated, users are provided application training at both the end-user level and system administration level. Customers can then start using our API to accomplish integration with other systems in their current architecture.

Additional partner capabilities: 3rd Party Content or other Enterprise Search Options

Convergence’s partners can also provide our customers additional options to their i2 implementations. CDS’s content partner, IHS, has integrated their engineering content, formerly i2 content, with the CDS architecture. This allows IHS to provide technical attribute data, lifecycle data or hazmat data services for standard electronic and mechanical parts. Convergence also has partnerships and established deployments with other search vendors like Endeca or Diesel Point. CDS’s exporting capabilities make it easy to provide search indexes to 3rd party search solutions to help meet our customer’s specific enterprise search needs.