Hoe Itron zijn dataverzamelingsprocessen optimaliseerde en effectiever part risk management ontwikkelde

The Background

Headquartered in Liberty Lake, Washington, Itron is an American technology company that helps a range of customers—including cities, municipalities, and utilities—effectively manage their energy and water resource management and consumption. The company features an integrated, intelligent platform of end points (such as sensors, meters, and switches) that collect data, control devices, and take action in the field.

Itron's communication networks harvest that data and deliver it where it's needed and turn it into insights. With Itron, customers can: Achieve more efficient operations; Ensure system resilience; Better engage their own consumers; Keep pace with market demand; Enhance profitability.

Itron currently operates in over 100 countries, serving upwards of 8,000 cities and utility companies in markets all over the world. Its annual revenue for 2023 was $2.2 billion. In recent years, the firm has also emerged as a leader in the smart city movement, which seeks to equip the world's largest population centers with smart technology that helps boost efficient resource use and sustainable operations.

The Challenge

Itron manufactures a wide array of technological devices ranging from meters, sensors, and communication modules to grid management tools and streetlight control hardware. Due to the breadth of its products and the scale of its customer base, the organization draws heavily from the electronic component supply chain.

Until mid-2022, Itron was under contract with a well-known parts management software vendor, a partnership that spanned nearly a decade. While the platform had served Itron reasonably well, the company wanted to streamline the way they analyzed their bills of materials (BOMs), gathered data on parts, and implemented derisking strategies. When the opportunity to find an alternative solution appeared, Megan Thalman—a product lifecycle management manager at Itron responsible for carrying out BOM reviews and managing part risk—saw a valuable opportunity for the company to reassess its relationship with the vendor.

"Itron wanted to streamline the way they analyzed their bills of materials (BOMs), gathered data on parts, and implemented derisking strategies."

Thalman and her colleagues decided to conduct a comprehensive strategic review to identify inefficiencies with their vendor and explore whether an alternative solution could deliver better results.

"I took charge of understanding, 'What functionalities do we need?'" Thalman recalled.

Issues with Concurrent Users: During what would prove a highly clarifying process, Thalman found several areas for improvement regarding the procurement team's ability to seamlessly track, manage, and analyze parts. Itron felt that multiple professionals—both within the procurement vertical and across other departments and teams—should be able to access and utilize the parts management system at the same time. "One of our basic requirements was concurrent users," she said.

Big Limits on Component Information Requests: Another limitation Thalman came across concerned the search quotas that the incumbent vendor had in place—a maximum number of component information requests that customers could make related to issues like compliance, lifecycle status, and parametric features. "Our AML (Approved Manufacturer List) is fairly large," Thalman pointed out. "We were finding that we were meeting our quota with the vendor fairly quickly."

Too Dependent on Manual Surveying for Part Compliance Info: Whenever a customer asked whether a specific product was RoHS or REACH compliant—to name just two key environmental regulations—the team "would have to do a manual survey every single time," she said. "It was very time intensive."

What Itron was asking for was completely understandable for a $2 billion company specializing in devices and hardware made up of myriad electronic components: as much seamless, unimpeded access to parts and supply chain intelligence as possible.

"We wanted the ability to upload BOMs, return component life cycles, environmental compliance, multi-sourcing risks, commodity segments, and country of origin," Thalman pointed out. "Basically, anything that we could get our hands on as far as our supply chain goes and any risk that would be associated with our parts and our BOMs."

Solution

By the summer of 2022, Itron's contract with its parts management vendor was nearing its end. Rather than renewing the deal, the company opted to explore other possibilities.

Around that time, one of Thalman's colleagues on the Itron procurement team, Ginger Ellis, suggested a new potential solution: Z2Data. "The timing was good; we were coming up on renewal," Ellis said. They decided to move forward with a demo.

Thalman, Ellis, and the rest of Itron's procurement team used a free two-week trial to test out Z2Data. Thalman used the trial period to carry out a scorecard-based comparison between Z2Data and Itron's incumbent parts management tool. Over what would eventually evolve into a three-week trial, the procurement team vigorously tested the platform's capabilities.

"I think what scored high was the amount of supply chain information that we were able to dig into," she recalled. "The level of insight that it was able to give us was far superior to what we had seen before with our incumbent solution."

In addition to recognizing the depth and expansiveness of Z2Data's database, Thalman also saw just how quickly her colleagues were taking to the platform's intuitive interface. "I think everybody who served as the trial users for Z2Data noted how much easier and more user-friendly Z2Data was to manage," she said. "It's organized in such a way that it's very easy for people to learn it if they just spend a little bit of time working in it."

Ellis found the experience with customer success "extremely engaging." "'From a relationship standpoint, or a service standpoint, Z2Data just sort of blew me away,' said Ellis."

By the time Itron's contract with its previous parts management system was up, the final decision was not a difficult one to make. During the third quarter of 2022, Thalman and her colleagues officially made the transition to Z2Data.

Result

Today, Thalman draws on Z2Data's suite of tools multiple times a week to carry out her tasks reviewing BOMs and looking for opportunities to derisk specific parts. "I use Z2Data quite a bit; I'd say if not daily, then every other day, with a lot of the work that I do," she remarked.

The procurement team uses internal documentation to track BOMs and components for all of Itron's high-revenue products, and Thalman draws on Z2Data's databases for a wide range of critical information that is ultimately fed into those files. Using the supply chain risk management platform, Thalman pulls out her parts' country of origin, obsolescence risk, and sourcing, among other critical intelligence. "That's been really helpful," she notes.

Z2Data now serves as the chief fulcrum for the procurement team's information-gathering processes. Only after extracting as much data as the professionals can find from the tool will they turn to Itron's global commodity managers (GCMs) to reach out to suppliers and obtain the rest manually.

Despite the obvious challenges inextricably tied to transitioning multiple teams to a new parts management system, Thalman actually found the entire process of moving to Z2Data fulfilling and memorable. "Honestly, it was a wonderful experience, at least for me, leading everybody on board," she remarked.