2020 brought Lytica a lot of change in our offerings as we transitioned our legacy products into our new SupplyLens™ Pro SaaS platform. The SupplyLens™ Pro platform delivers 24/7 access to our unique electronic component market intelligence through our first two plug-ins; Spend Benchmarking and Price Estimator.
SupplyLens™ Pro draws on the world’s largest and only independent database with millions of electronic components of actual prices paid by real customers. Lytica informs you of where your pricing is out-of-line, so you can protect yourself from overpaying and realize unprecedented savings with suppliers. We have customers worldwide, including 20% of Fortune 500 companies in the electronics market. To date, we’ve analyzed over $250B USD in electronic component spend for our clients.
Spend Benchmarking Plug-in
The Spend Benchmarking plugin allows your company to securely upload your electronic component spend data to receive a comprehensive spend and risk analysis with negotiating advice at your part number level. The platform is able to break down your analysis into several valuable modules to identify your greatest savings opportunities and give you greater confidence in your pricing negotiations. These 8 modules include;
- Scoreboard – allowing an easy view of the most important and actionable insights provided within this plugin.
- Spend Competitiveness – Competitiveness by commodity examines the variation in your component prices to “Best in Class” values. With Best in class being 100%, your competitiveness percentage score ranks your performance against this hallmark.
- Customer Part Number (CPN) List – A comprehensive list of the MPNs and associated details that you’ve uploaded into the SupplyLens reference database for analysis.
- Target Price Savings – Target Price Savings are derived from your worst priced matched components when contrasted against predicted prices derived from your competitiveness characterization. Target prices are part-specific and actionable.
- Duplication Savings – Duplication Savings arise when the same or equivalent MPNs are coded with different CPNs and these CPNs have different prices associated with them. This usually occurs as a result of mergers or acquisitions where two component naming systems are mixed together.
- Arbitrage Savings – Arbitrage Savings, using the name from the practice of trading shares on price differences with a given stock listed on different stock exchanges, are available when a company is paying different prices for the same component (Client Part Number or CPN) in different locations.
- Single Source Risk – For CPNs input with only one MPN, our analysis looks to see if other customers using that MPN have second sources. If so, we will recommend alternatives with no guarantee that they will work in your application. Your design and component engineers are responsible for the validation of any of potential substitutions in your design.
- End of Life – The current lifecycle status of that particular MPN within the SupplyLens reference database.
I’m excited to share a new release (v2.5) of our Spend Benchmarking plugin coming on January 15th, as we’ve added a new module called ‘AVL Duplication Savings’. If you remember from above, Duplication Savings arise when the same or equivalent MPNs are coded with different CPNs and these CPNs have different prices associated with them. These equivalent MPNs would need to be approved by your component engineers for use in your designs.
The new ‘AVL Duplication Savings’ module is looking at the equivalent CPNs within your own AVL, rather than Lytica’s AVL, that have different prices associated to them. These CPNs are immediately actionable as they’ve already been approved on your AVL by your component engineers.
Price Estimator Plug-in
The second offering from the SupplyLens™ Pro platform is our Price Estimator plugin. Price Estimator is an enhanced evolution of our legacy product called ‘Component Cost Estimator’. Price Estimator is the perfect market solution for Component Engineers, Hardware Designers and Purchasing Professionals. This is a powerful and easy-to-use plug-in that allows you to cost reduce your BoM and identify second sources. Price Estimator is only based on real customer data. Distribution column pricing, Manufacturer suggested pricing, and internet pricing are not part of our database or used in any statistical models. Users are able to simply enter a Manufacturing Part Number (MPN) and instantly get back MPN pricing information such as the Marketing Leading Price, 50th percentile price, and selectable competitiveness* level price that gives you the ability to zero in on the price that’s appropriate for your company for upcoming negotiations with suppliers.
(* Lytica is able to characterize and rank a customer’s electronic component spend by Commodity and use this characterization of Competitiveness to identify pricing outliers as a basis for renegotiation. To clearly understand your competitiveness level, run a Spend Benchmarking exercise to know how your company stacks up compared to market.)
Component risk information is an area that we’ve expanded in Price Estimator delivering the Lifecycle of the part as well as 4 proprietary Lytica risk metrics to identify any potential risks associated that include;
- MPN Breadth – Represents the popularity of a Manufacturing Part Number (MPN) within Lytica’s global database of peer market intelligence.
- MFR Breadth – Represents the popularity of the Manufacturer within Lytica’s global database of peer market intelligence.
- Due Diligence – A weighted metric based on the number of Fortune1000 & Global2000 companies (clients) vs. other companies using a Manufacturer within Lytica’s global database of peer market intelligence.
- MPN Concentration – Determined by the number of companies using a large portion of the total estimated annual usage.
2021 SupplyLens™ Pro Roadmap
Lytica’s 2021 product roadmap has many new valuable additions to our SupplyLens™ Pro plugins with exciting new features and modules. Our Technology and Engineering team are also working on many new things behind the scenes to bring you even more potential savings and insights into your electronic component supply chain. I look forward to an exciting year with Lytica as VP of Product Management and engaging with many of you to better understand your company’s supply chain pain points and how Lytica’s solutions can help. If you’d like to learn more, or ensure you’re getting the best price for your components, let’s jump on a call sometime.
Shawn Bradley
