i2 Component and Supplier Management™ (CSM) is a best-in-class catalog and content search solution used
to improve sourcing and procurement processes. It can be used by a variety of users within a company such as
purchasing and commodity managers, operations, product development, as well as sales and customer service staff.
i2 CSM is an integral part of the i2 Supplier Relationship
Management™ (SRM) solution and can provide a comprehensive
and powerful catalog solution to enable material
and supplier management relevant to i2 SRM applications.
"Parts reuse is not a nice-to-have improvement; it should be a working mandate…. Aberdeen conservatively
estimates that between 30% and 40% of a manufacturer’s parts are duplicates or have acceptable substitutes.
With the annual carrying cost of between $4,500 and $23,000 per item for the introduction of a new part number,
duplicate part proliferation is an area of known cost exposure."
— Aberdeen Group, "Component & Supplier Management: Saving Time and Money Part by Part," March 2002
Powerful as a standalone solution
Reduce total cost of purchasing for direct and indirect materials
i2 CSM can reduce purchased material costs for both
direct and indirect materials by reducing the number
of parts and suppliers through data normalization,
cross-referencing, and through a structured new
part and supplier introduction process.
When used to manage maintenance, repair, and
operations (MRO) items, it can help reduce production
downtime of equipment, repair cycle times, inventory,
expediting costs and supply risk, as well as adhere to
sourcing strategies. When used for direct materials,
it can improve component re-use, decrease inventory,
and can help product development adhere to sourcing
strategies for approved parts and vendors as well as
performance and cost metrics.
Improve visibility of materials and suppliers
by rationalizing part and supplier master
Companies that have grown through acquisitions or that
use multiple ERP/MRP systems across different sites and
divisions often end up maintaining multiple master data
sources. The common result is thousands of duplicate
part numbers and supplier names that lack intelligent
cross-referencing capabilities to help companies
determine what they’re buying from which vendor.
i2 CSM is designed to improve productivity by providing
users with a single solution to access part and supplier
information that is crucial for transaction and decisionsupport
applications. The foundation is a part and
supplier management solution that can aggregate
information from multiple systems and normalize data.
This can enable powerful parametric searching on the
corporate item master and reference catalogs such as
the i2 Electronics Database™ as well as external part
databases. The solution is deployed with i2’s worldclass
content services that can identify and eliminate
duplicates and apply cross-referencing rules to bring
users to the best source for a given part.
Increased productivity through ease of use
and high find ratio
i2 CSM can allow users to conduct powerful parametric
part searches with dynamic filtering in both internal
and external databases to quickly identify duplicate
parts and functional equivalents. The solution can guide
buyers and maintenance engineers to select preferred
parts and suppliers with best price performance.
Quickly find what you need and use analysis tools to make
the best choice – choose from multiple find methods
Users can enter keywords and enable the search engine
to do the work of specifying and running parametric
searches, or browsing the catalog hierarchy and viewing
all permissible items at any level. Power users can also
navigate to the category of interest and either deploy a
smart search or assign values for category-specific attributes.
These find methods take advantage of i2 Content’s
expertise in aggregating and cross-referencing data from
manufacturers, suppliers, and even buyers.
Leverage powerful refine and analysis tools
CSM can automatically categorize results spanning
multiple catalog categories in a single click. Users
can sort these results by any parameter, or click a
parameter and specify desired values from a qualified
list. Results can be viewed in a user-tested table or
image views, compared items across all available
attributes, and details such as customer-specific
pricing can be viewed.
Flexible integration to ERP and other transaction systems
i2 CSM can enable seamless workflows to enable
effective requisitioning and driving compliance for
preferred materials, spares, and suppliers.
Organize selections in lists for future re-use or
submittal to transaction systems.
Create multiple sharable lists. Create, save, and share
lists of items and suppliers for reuse. Lists can be
shared with group members – within your enterprise
or enterprise-wide, and even across enterprises.
Capabilities and features
User-friendly content search capability
Smart search includes thesaurus, stemming, concept,
and fuzzy matching
Browse by category includes hierarchy display
or alphabetical index and category search
Browse by category can be used with smart search
Save and share search criteria
Advanced search includes parametric search,
a unified schema, and cross-references
Powerful data analysis and search refinement capability
Refine results by category and/or attributes
Leverage different views of data such as manufacturer
content, supplier content, buyer content, images, and
normalized prices
Compare items or companies by available attributes
Lowest price analyzer
Find auctions, RFQs, and articles in distributed
content sources containing selected items, supplier
and/or matching item, and supplier attributes
View item-level details such as specifications, pricing
and availability – multiple pricing models available,
documents, notes, alternates, components/where
used, accessories, and find alternate suppliers
View company-level details such as company
attributes, contacts, categories served, documents,
and promotions
Robust and flexible integration framework
Integrates with entire i2 Supplier Relationship
Management suite
Leverage standard e-procurement punch-out
workflows, using i2 CSM as the catalog, validating
and then submitting selected items back to the
e-procurement system
Work seamlessly within a complex, multi-service
environment to validate and submit user selections
to other services such as auctioning systems, RFQ
systems, approval workflows, and other (external)
transaction systems
Submit single or multiple items to multiple B2B
transaction services
Submit from list and search results pages
Automatically validate content before releasing
to the selected service
Error handling for invalid submittal content
Integration adapters available for SAP R/3 (MM/PM)
Also supports XML-based integration via
XSLT connectors
User-specific organize and administer capability
Personalized home page
Ability to personalize channels for finding, lists,
shortcuts, as well as for news, and alerts from
distributed content sources
User personalization includes setting of pages
viewable on the home page, default views of
information on pages, default display language,
preferred currency, etc.
List management supports adding of items and
companies to lists and saving for reuse, adding
links to enable distributed content sources, merging
of lists, and sharing lists with defined groups
Multiple language support
Locale-independent data such as primary keys
of an item that are typically always in one language
Locale-dependent data such as number, date, time,
currency which is typically entered once and software
handles the conversion based on user preferences
Locale-specific data such as item description
in several languages, is entered directly in its
original form
Ability to handle properties such as VAT whose
existence is dependent on only certain locales
Support for localized user interface in sixteen
different languages
Want to learn more?
at 877.926.9286, or contact your nearest i2 sales office.
