Andrew White

I was trolling my email “inbox” this morning and I read with interest an email from a vendor I met recently at a briefing.  In November, Panjiva updated me on their business: their offering is based on knowledge gleaned from perusing all the inbound manifests for goods arriving in the US.  By analyzing the data, both quantity, content, and frequency, Panjiva can discover information describing how supply chains are performing, as well as the overall economic cycle with respect to purchasing patterns of US firms.  They started by looking at apparel product and supply chains but they are expanding now into many other segments.  

After reading my interesting email, I then turned to my Financial Times and there, on the front page, was the same article from Panjiva.  The head line read, “Slump in US clothing sales leads to 70% fall in overseas suppliers.”  The fascinating article, referring to the same source in the email I had received, reported a reduction in total volume, and number of suppliers (70 per cent between July to October 2009), servicing buyers of apparel products in the US.  Of those suppliers shipping, they report a reduction in volume of at least 75 per cent.  This is frightening data that highlights how the results of the credit crunch are winding its way through the economy.  No wonder many manufacturers are ramping up with their cost cutting efforts.  

Ignoring the actual content, Panjiva is an interesting vendor.  The value proposition is innovative.  By sniffing data that is effectively public (you have to pay the US Customs a small fee to buy the data, every day) and applying specific metrics and analytics the vendor has been able to interpret dumb data and infer business trends that help business users make smarter decisions.  The vendor is now building a business by selling their inferences and insights back to the buyers, and sellers, to help them look for new and better opportunities to improve business.  This is not quite an MDM play, but certainly a neat play on finding value from information that has been around for a long time.

Don’t forget to look at Gartner’s initiative to help IT cut business and IT costs.  We have lots of research that addresses many aspects of the business that you should be leveraging.