Posted on Wed, Feb 15, 2012
Akoya is a cash flow positive tech startup currently located in Rosemont, IL that specializes in Supply Chain Analytics for the manufacturing industry.
Areas of our expertise include part should cost costing, quantifying supplier capabilities, industry benchmarking, risk assessment and business intelligence.
Currently there are 2 job postings available:
Business Intelligence/Data Analyst
We are seeking an individual with 2-3 years business intelligence experience in a service based, data-driven enterprise to join our small team to help us invent and develop out our core competencies.
Learn more
Software Developer
We are seeking an individual with 3-5 years programming experience in a service based, data-driven enterprise to join our small team to help us invent and develop out our core competencies.
Learn More
Posted on Mon, Mar 15, 2010
Rosemont, Ill. (March 15, 2010) - Akoya, Inc. today announced that it has been granted a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the analytics methodology behind its software. This methodology is used by manufacturers to reduce product costs and strategically manage their purchasing and engineering organizations.
The patent covers the multivariate modeling method used to define the cost drivers of highly complex manufactured parts with the goal of predicting individual part prices. Akoya uses this methodology to dramatically improve upon current product cost management practices, which are labor intensive, time consuming and inefficient.
“We knew the value of our technology by the amount of success our customers had achieved in reducing their product costs,” said Karen Caswelch, Akoya’s CEO. “Receiving patent approval provides further validation of our technology, especially as we grow beyond the automotive, aerospace, and heavy equipment markets.”
Akoya’s technology can quickly analyze massive volumes of unstructured part feature and financial data that is subsequently used to uncover cost reduction opportunities across major categories of components and to quickly identify the specific actions required to realize them. It also helps purchasing managers assess the competitiveness of each supplier and monitor the progress toward cost reduction goals. With Akoya, an in-depth cost analysis on a few hundred suppliers or a few thousand components that previously took experts months to complete can now be accomplished with greater accuracy in only a few days.
“We congratulate our development team for this important accomplishment,” said David Wortman, Akoya’s Executive Chairman. “Through their innovation, expertise, and dedication, our team has given our customers a powerful technology and a competitive advantage. We applaud this latest achievement.”
About Akoya
Akoya, based in Chicago, provides patented analytic software that helps manufacturers reduce product costs and strategically manage their purchasing and engineering organizations by identifying pricing inefficiencies and supplier effectiveness. For more information, go to www.akoyainc.com.
Posted on Mon, Feb 15, 2010
Ex-General Motors Executive to Work Closely With Manufacturing Customers to Reduce Costs of Highly Engineered Parts Rosemont, Ill. (February 15, 2010) - Akoya, Inc., the leading product cost management solution provider, today announced the appointment of Karen Caswelch, formerly Vice President of Purchasing at Allison Transmission, as its new Chief Executive Officer.
“Karen is the perfect fit for Akoya,” said David Wortman, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Akoya. “She’s got real-world knowledge of what manufacturing executives are looking for in procurement and sourcing, and she knows from her own experience exactly how they gain the most value from our solution.”
When she was at Allison Transmission, Caswelch saw the promise of Akoya’s software for her organization.
“What struck me initially was the powerful information that Akoya puts at your fingertips,” said Caswelch. “Akoya’s enterprise-wide analysis of complete categories of parts not only gives management the macro-level information needed to review and set purchasing strategy, it also gives the detailed information needed to address cost inefficiencies on an individual-part basis.”
Now at the helm of Akoya, Caswelch is even more confident in Akoya’s abilities and the tremendous benefits she sees the software can bring to manufacturers.
Caswelch said, “Supply-base management, target price alignment, cost savings identification, and risk mitigation can be done quickly and accurately. Add in the ability of engineering to use Akoya for new product target costing and Akoya truly is a total cost management system.”Fortune 500 manufacturers have used Akoya’s analytic software to identify more than $100 million in savings. A full return on investment is typically achieved within six months of implementation. To ensure maximum applicability and minimal disruption, Akoya performs a free, detailed Customer Impact Analysis before each implementation.
Caswelch has more than 20 years of global, cross-industry executive-level management experience. At Allison Transmission, she reduced materials costs by over 10% and improved the supplier defect rate by over 96%. Prior to Allison, she held various management positions during her 16-year term with General Motors Corporation, including Director of Order to Delivery and Director of Manufacturing & Quality Planning for GM in the Asia-Pacific region.
Caswelch holds an MBA from Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has earned the Managerial Excellence award from National Women of Color.
About Akoya
Akoya, based in Chicago, provides patented analytic software that helps manufacturers reduce product costs and strategically manage their purchasing and engineering organizations by identifying pricing inefficiencies and supplier effectiveness. For more information, go to www.akoyainc.com.
Posted on Fri, Apr 17, 2009
Rosemont, Ill. (April 17, 2009) -– Akoya Inc. announces the latest release of its Design Workbench Product Suite, which helps product designers in heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace and defense companies develop more cost competitive products and increase profits in new product introductions by up to 15 percent.
The Design Workbench provides significant advancements in lean product development practices by giving companies immediate insight into more cost-effective designs. It does this by determining the Competitive Band - the most efficient price range in which a manufacturer can acquire a product component in the market from an effective producer - for any combination of design variables. The result is quicker time-to-market by eliminating cross-functional bottlenecks and lower product costs by improving design cost visibility across product platforms.
In the Competitive Banding process, Akoya accumulates a manufacturers’ current purchase price, production and detailed component attributes, applies advanced information science and analytics to evaluate competitive drivers, and determines the actions required to achieve a more competitive cost for the product components.
”We have seen that 80 percent of the design cycle can be spent re-working a product to meet cost parameters because they were not known when the critical design decisions were made,” said Brett Holland, Akoya’s president. “With Akoya’s Design Workbench, designs can be evaluated for cost-effectiveness at any time, from concept through production. Additionally, the Competitive Banding information we use promotes more effective dialog between product design, supply management and manufacturing.”
About Akoya
Akoya makes products more profitable through Competitive Banding Analysis, which can reduce product component costs across entire families by up to 15 percent. Based in Chicago, the company can be reached at www.akoyainc.com.
Posted on Fri, Mar 20, 2009
Manufacturing Business Technology
March 20, 2009
PLM and Profitability
By Jim Brown http://www.mbtmag.com/blog/1690000369/post/1050042305.html
One-to-One: Akoya Reducing Cost the PLM Way
I had the chance to talk with ... Brett Holland of Akoya about how their solutions help manufacturers design cost out of products. I have always been intrigued by the potential for Product Cost Management solutions to allow manufacturers to design with cost in mind. Given today's economic outlook, this is certainly top of mind for many manufacturers.
What do they Offer?
In my post about designing your company out of a bad economy I pointed out the importance of engineering to reduce cost. Akoya is aligned with that goal, offering software that helps companies make better design decisions related to cost. The key is to make good design decisions that are also good supply decisions. For example, the software and related content can help a designer make tradeoffs between different types of castings based on a good estimate of cost. Akoya has traditionally offered a Category Workbench that offers great insight into cost drivers for specific categories (like the casting example above). Akoya has now launched a Design Workbench as well that is intended to be used by the engineer directly. The concepts is for designers to gain insight into the factors that drive cost in supply, and have them make better tradeoffs between performance, quality, and cost up front. Types of things to consider are:
Given the number of cost reduction projects manufacturers are embarking on, the timing is good for this approach. Akoya provides both the software and the sourcing knowledge/content to help manufacturers design for supply effectively.
Who do they Work With?
Akoya has worked closely with large industrial equipment manufacturers. Most notably (and publicly) they speak about CAT. They have also worked with Agco, among others in the construction and agricultural equipment markets. Other sectors of interest include the automotive industry, where cost reduction and simplication offer huge potential savings.
How does this Fit into the Ecosystem?
To me, this is a no-brainer to be included in the PLM suite. After all, the goal of PLM is to help companies profit from their products. As PLM continues to address more than the technical aspects of the product, cost is an excellent area to focus on. This is a blind spot for many companies today, as ERP can't offer insight on things that have not been purchased before, or for that matter what a part should cost versus what is being paid for it. Procurement solutions typically don't tie down to the details of the products. And PLM solutions, for the most part, still have a lot of work to do in regards to understanding and managing product cost. This is a company that offers a very compelling value in the current economy, and is worth a look.
So that's what I hear from them Akoya, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?
Posted on Mon, Feb 23, 2009
Supply & Demand Chain Executive
February 23, 2009
Guest Column: Save Jobs and Gain the Ultimate Competitive Advantage through Better Use of Information By Brett Holland
A modest proposal for creating your own internal stimulus package by using a new type of analysis to mine critical product information and achieve ultimate lowest total cost mix
February 24, 2009 — Unless you have taken a vacation from the planet, you can't help but acknowledge that the biggest news in the manufacturing world is layoffs. With over 200,000 layoffs in the manufacturing sector in January alone, it is no wonder that saving and creating jobs is officially priority number one for our new president.
I've seen this movie before.
In every major economic downturn, it seems we come to a point at which every OEM competes for the greatest amount of bad news all at once so they can take their "one- time charge," get the check-off from the investment community and move into hunker- down mode to wait out the storm.
It's time this movie had a new ending.
Great companies realize that the best time to institute meaningful change and gain stronger market position is during a downturn like this. The current surge in the bond market is evidence that companies are making moves. We are seeing capitalist Darwinism at its finest, and I am sure we will continue to see it for the rest of the year.
So how can companies do things differently this time, take advantage of new ideas, retain their most valuable resources — their people — and make gains on their competitors?
As any economist will tell you, productivity is the cornerstone of growth. We are clearly in an age in which access to, and optimal use of, relevant information drives productivity. Jack Welch said, "An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage."
This applies now more than ever. Therefore, if you want to make gains during this economic meltdown, you better start digging deeper and smarter into your sources of information for the insights you will need.
This "ultimate competitive advantage" is not adversely affected by credit markets, does not require a bailout to be effective, does not even fall prey to acts of Congress, but it does require people. So, let's talk about how to save jobs through better use of information.
Determining the Ultimate Lowest Total Cost Mix
A great example is provided by a large equipment manufacturer that is pooling together hundreds of people from across the organization who would normally be laid off. They are focusing the efforts of these people on innovative cost reduction initiatives that not only will save enough money to pay their salaries but also will create real changes in the organization — changes that will allow the company to emerge from the recession in a much stronger position.
And what is the key to success for this effort? Better mining and use of their critical product information.
Using a new type of analysis called "competitive banding," they are digging deep into the recesses of their CAD files and financial systems to put together a virtual storehouse of relevant feature information (e.g., height, volume, quantity of drilled holes, weight, material, tolerances, manufacturing requirements, pricing, demand, suppliers, etc.). They are then dedicating the best analytical minds in the organization to new forms of analysis on this information. And the oversight for this project goes all the way up to the CEO.
In competitive banding analysis, manufacturing companies are able to directly tie individual component features to pricing and sourcing information to determine the drivers of competitiveness across all of their products. In doing so, they can effectively determine the best price at which they can acquire each component in their market from the most effective producer. This allows them to rebalance their production and sourcing mix across all their components for the ultimate lowest total cost mix. Insights from competitive banding also relate to the design of these components so manufacturers can design them to be most cost-effectively produced, either internally or externally.
This competitive banding process is being launched using several teams made up of the pooled resources from around the organization. Each team conducts a series of 30 day workshops on their chosen set of components. These workshops identify and isolate inefficiencies in pricing, sourcing and/or design, and lay out corrective actions.
Each workshop leads to enough savings to pay for up to 20 salaries per year. At a large manufacturing company, collectively these workshops can save hundreds of jobs. It is a stimulus package in its own right. At the end of the year, the manufacturer will not only gain massive efficiencies that will better position the company to tackle the market but will also retain more of the talented resources that will fuel its recovery and growth.
It is time that more manufacturers realize the potential in their information and understand that their own people are the key to unlocking it. There are many innovative ways to amass critical information and glean real competitive value from it. Layoffs are not the solution to getting through these tough times; they are part of the problem. Let's all continue to think of ways we can keep talented people employed through creative initiatives that make better use of information.
About the Author: Brett Holland is president of Akoya, Inc., a Rosemont, Ill.-based provider of next-generation product cost management solutions. He has more than a decade of significant manufacturing and information management experience, having founded both Akoya and BoxDirect, two innovative information companies that service the manufacturing industry. He also served as vice president of operations for Summit Container Corporation, a manufacturer of packaging products. More information on Akoya at www.akoyainc.com.
Posted on Tue, Mar 18, 2008
Sourcing Innovation
March 18, 2009
Spend Matters in Procurement http://blog.sourcinginnovation.com/
Spend Matters in Procurement Yesterday, over on Spend Matters, JB brought up two very good points.
1. Every dollar spent on procurement will generate a 300% to 600% ROI As noted in beyond shedding the deadweight in procurement and operations, the last place
you want to cut budget is procurement. When Hackett data continually finds that average performing companies get a 300% annual return from procurement focused dollars and best- in-class performers get a 600% annual return from procurement-focussed dollars, in these tough economic times, you should be increasing your procurement budget. Many products, especially SaaS offerings where you pay by the month, will generate a return before the second payment is due. Plus, most of the better service providers are willing to wait until the project is completed and you document a return before invoicing you. That means you can actually make the money to fund your operations before you even spend it!
2. It's never been a better time for a make/buy analysis Not only will this help you turn on a dime if you have to turn on a dime because your current supplier goes under, a natural disaster takes out a key raw material (and you need a replacement product that uses an alternate raw material), or cost increases force a new business model, but it could also help you save a bundle. In addition to the e-Sourcing and Decision Optimization vendors that JB lists, whatever you do, don't forget the should-cost experts at Akoya and Apriori. You don't want to make a sourcing decision based solely on price quotes alone. Otherwise, you might accept a low-bid that is unsustainable by the supplier who is so desperate for your business that they effectively bid themselves out of business.
Posted on Thu, Jul 20, 2006
Show Me the Money
Akoya’s cost analysis technology digs deep to help manufacturers find potential savings.
July 20, 2006 By: Kenneth Wong Cadalyst
Brett Holland, chief operating officer of Akoya, is convinced he has the technology to help buyers and sourcing departments wade through swamps of financial data to find buried nuggets of savings. That's why his company's flagship product is named after one of the most sought-after types of pearls.
The Treasure Trove
According to Akoya, a manufacturer's purchasing world can be divided into three distinct categories.
Indirect materials: Paper, pens and other ready-made items that are not designed by the company and won't go into their products.
Catalogable direct materials: Screws, snaps and other items that will be incorporated into end products.
Highly engineered direct materials: Items designed specifically for the company's purposes and that will become part of the company's end products.
The majority of what a manufacturer buys, Akoya observes, are the highly engineered direct materials. Akoya Cost Management Analytics takes you deep into this last category to find the hidden potential savings. This is where a product's cost is largely driven by its unique design characteristics: materials, density, number of curves, number of void surfaces and so on. So if you can find correlations between the cost and these attributes, you might be able to find ways to lower the cost by redesigning the part or reshuffling the supply chain.
"Let's take, for example, the aluminum couplings used in trucks," observes Mickey North Rizza, an analyst from AMR Research. "You might say, 'Aluminum prices are going up. Can I make this part out of something else? If I can't, can I shave off some of its wall thickness? Where can I do that? How can I do that? Where is it going to impact me the least, in terms of durability, functionality and stress resistance?' Then you ask, 'What other products can I apply the same process to?' Now you have an entirely new repeatable way of looking at components and reducing costs."
How it Works
In Holland's words, Akoya "takes the [client's] CAD files, strips the relevant information and marries that to the financial data." Once the information from CAD files, purchasing and accounting are in place, you can assemble a dataset, comprising a collection of parts. You can summon up parts by finding similar parts to one target part (based on characteristics such as the number of holes, the degree of tolerance required and so on) or by specific categories (forging, casting, hydraulics and so on). And you can reorder the grouping by supplier, materials, weight, part number or some other attribute, much in the same way you might rearrange columns in a Microsoft Access or ACT! database. Then you hit a button to run analysis.
The mathematical models Akoya uses to calculate savings might be impossible to convey in plain English. For what it's worth, here's Holland's summation: "Our analytics map the relationships between the [parts'] features and their costs. From those relationships, we can predict the cost of the part based on the feature set involved. So we compare what it should cost based on its features to what it does cost in the market -- what you have to pay for it. Then we find the delta [the incremental variables] within it, multiply it by whatever volume you are buying and then come up with potential savings."
The Analysis Results dashboard shows a tabulated inventory of the part characteristics that influence the costs, along with the greatest opportunities for cost savings. For deeper analysis, you can dissect the parts individually. For example, by examining the part's history and design features, you might discover that the pressure test required to produce the part is one of the greatest cost drivers.
The other part of Akoya's strength is its supply source analysis. It can stack up one supplier against the others in a comparative view, giving you clues as to which supplier is the best fit for a part or group of parts. Based on the part's manufacturing requirements, you might then single out suppliers with proven competency in machining holes or handling multiple risers. In some cases, you might find that you can realize some savings simply by increasing or decreasing the length of your contracts with certain suppliers.
Implementation
When asked to discuss implementation timeframe, Holland says, "It's not like an enterprise software implementation." In other words, it's not a drawn out process that might take years. "We usually set the time around three to four months. It gives us time to understand the organization, their data structure, what's unique about the data structure, and then configure a system for them," he estimates.
AMR's Rizza remarks, "The product is currently centered around discrete industries. I see an immediate impact in aerospace and defense, automotive and industrial equipment. The design and source process accounts for approximately 5% of the cost in these industries. But the process defines more than 70% of the program costs, so targeting the costs during the initial design and sourcing phases is imperative."
"Our clients come from mainly four industries," Holland says. "Industrial equipment, aerospace and defense, automotive and high tech." Akoya is currently not thinking of veering far beyond traditional discrete manufacturing markets, but, Holland points out, "A lot of the same characteristics exist in other industries, like retail and apparel. A shirt, for instance, has threat count, button count, cufflinks, fabric and other differentiators, but retailers have no mechanism for calculating, say, how much does the addition of a certain sheen affect the cost of the shirt?"
Reading Between the Numbers
Accounting systems and enterprise systems can spit out reports with raw numbers, but certain manufacturing variables influencing a product's cost won't be apparent at first glance. "What is the effect of a certain material on a product?" Holland asks us to ponder. "That's not the same as asking how much the material costs. If you choose one material over another, you know it adds
$2 per pound, but how much additional will it cost in primary machining, secondary machining -- how does it affects the overall cost of the product? How about requirement testing? You can tell how much it costs to run a durability test, pressure test, tolerance test, but what is the effect of dropping [the tolerance level] to 5 microns? It's pretty difficult to determine that unless you have those factors mapped to the cost structure."
AMR's Rizza says, "What I like about [Akoya] is, it helps you think about what's important, what's not important, how you want to integrate the items and what you want to do going forward. ... [The company] has a great product -- there's no doubt about that. But getting it out there, getting it used -- that's difficult. Like any new company putting out a new product, it's going to take time."
Posted on Tue, Jan 03, 2006
A Top-Down Approach to Should-Cost Analytics Deborah Wilson, a consultant in procurement and supply chain management, features Akoya and its approach to should-cost analytics in her online magazine.
Posted on Tue, Jan 03, 2006
INNOVATIONS Caterpillar turning to Internet for deals
By Jon Van Tribune staff reporter Published March 20, 2006
A savvy consumer seeking bargain prices for a TV set, automobile or even a best-selling novel will likely fire up a computer to launch a Web search.
With a shopping list of 600,000 different items, managers at Peoria-based Caterpillar Inc. also are on the lookout for bargains, and they, too, are turning to computers to search for good deals.
Instead of just using market power to demand across- the-board discounts from vendors, as many large industrial players do, Caterpillar is pioneering a computer-aided means of cutting costs it hopes will benefit itself and its suppliers.
"Most members of the supply chain cringe" when a major customer wants to discuss price reductions, said William Morton, chief of Morton Industrial Group Inc., which sells some 4,000 different parts to Caterpillar to the tune of about $80 million a year.
But Morton said he welcomes Caterpillar's new approach and hopes soon to use it himself when dealing with his own vendors.
Caterpillar uses computer data-mining techniques to look at thousands of parts, not only scrutinizing pricing information, but also weighing details of their design, manufacture and function.
By tapping into computer data that Caterpillar engineers already use to design and make parts, this analysis provides a wealth of information to help determine not only which parts appear overpriced, but also to provide clues as to what's driving excessive cost.
Because the technical information comes straight from design and manufacturing software, Morton said, it can suggest if a part such as a radiator guard his company makes for a Caterpillar backhoe uses too many welds or has unneeded parts, inflating its price.
"We can have a conversation that benefits everyone," Morton said.
Caterpillar's own researchers created the necessary databases and software to improve the company's purchasing processes, but the company decided a couple of years ago that it needed to spin off the software development process to a smaller company that could focus exclusively on commercializing it.
That Peoria-based company, Akoya Inc., counts Caterpillar as its biggest customer and beta tester, and it has begun to market the software to others. Indeed, Ted Greene, Akoya's chief executive, pitches his product as providing the competitive edge U.S. manufacturers need to succeed in winning business that might otherwise go to Asian factories.
"Purchasing is becoming strategic," said Greene. "It used to be tactical, but CEOs are seeing that it is associated with cost drivers. It's like what happened with information technology. The purchasing function is critical to survival."
Companies have always sought to wring costs out of their operations by wiser purchasing, but it's tedious and time consuming to analyze thousands of parts manually. Bringing a computer to the task speeds the process significantly, Greene said.
"What we can do is highlight the core competency of a supplier," he said. "This helps him compete against
China. Price is a concern to a manufacturer, but it's not at the top of the list. They're more concerned with quality and prompt delivery.
"You cannot just beat up on suppliers. We provide a common language, something the buyer and supplier can both look at."
Computerized purchasing analysis was first devised at Caterpillar by two managers, Nelson Jones and Syamala Srinivasan, who were frustrated that commercially available software programs required too much manual input from engineers and were too slow.
They decided to apply data-mining techniques to the mountains of product information already stored in computers to assist the design and manufacture of products.
"It's a little like buying a house," said Jones. "You have two bedrooms, so many square feet, and you look at what similar houses in the same neighborhood are selling for. If you add a bedroom or a three-car garage, you have a formula to show how much that should add to the cost."
Applying their software to 2,500 cast parts such as elbows, housings and pulleys that are used to make Caterpillar engines, Jones said they found 250 parts that appeared overpriced. In fact, the analysis' first run suggested that the overall cost of all 2,500 parts would drop by 17 percent merely by bringing the prices for these 250 parts into line, he said.
Of course when the engineers took a closer look at some parts spotlighted by the computer program, they found reasons for high prices in some cases, Jones said, but they also discovered many ways to lower costs.
"What we found was that we could realize about one- third of the rough potential suggested by the computer analysis," Jones said. "So the net was we could trim 5 to 7 percent from the overall cost of this family of parts."
Caterpillar management decided that spinning off the software to an outside company would mean faster progress on refining and improving it, and it may also make money.
"This isn't a core product for Caterpillar," said Bill Wendle, Caterpillar manager of business services. "It enables a key process for us. But we think that Akoya can apply this tool and enhance it with features useful to many companies."