Saffron Technology
Advanced Analytics for Smart Device Manufacturers

With the rapid growth of smart products containing embedded software, more manufacturers are becoming software and services companies, even though software development is not their traditional area of expertise.

In such a scenario, accelerating a product’s time-to-market with quality is the top management challenge embedded software manufacturing firms face today. The pressure to ensure the product is rolled out on time often leads to hard-to-find bugs and insufficient features that erode already-small profit margins. “SaffronStreamline™, is our cognitive analytics application, helping manufacturers improve lifecycle management of embedded software in smart products,” says Gayle Sheppard, CEO of Saffron. SaffronStreamline™, unifies multi-sourced data – like ALM and PLM – with enterprise data into a single layer of intelligence to gain a comprehensive view into the organization for fast and accurate knowledge sharing and collaboration.

With the rapid augmentation of connected devices, hardware, mechanical and software, Saffron has garnered strong acclamation for its cognitive analytics platform which helps manufacturers shorten time to market and manage potential risks. The company solves the challenges of complex product design by reducing verification time in bringing together issue tracking for hardware, software and electro mechanical design teams leading to faster time to market and higher quality products.

SaffronStreamline™ helps protect profit margins from eroding warranty and service demands while allowing companies to increase customer satisfaction with faster fixes getting the right products to market on time. Saffron does this by unifying disconnected enterprise-system data sources such as PLM and ALM to get a single view into the development process. In addition to unifying these internal enterprise data sources that have never been unified before, SaffronStreamline™ pulls in issues and expertise gathered from external sources such as Stack Overflow and other data sources selected by the customer. This allows organizations with large, globally-dispersed teams to easily identify similar issues, duplicates, share root causes of issues, and identify and bring together experts who work on similar issues who have similar skill sets for collaboration.

The application can classify business risk of issues and defects so that companies can prioritize resources appropriately.

“Unlike other data analytics companies that spend months implementing their technology in their customer’s environment, we take just days to set up our solution in a customer environment with little or no intervention,” says Sheppard. “We don’t rely on rules and models that need to be trained and retrained. Instead, Saffron learns autonomously and continuously like the human brain.” This allows Saffron to always be real-time and relevant. The company’s current market focus includes smart device manufacturers and services organizations where embedded software is a core part of the delivered products and services.

Saffron has a proven track record around mission-critical operational intelligence with a myriad of customers from Baker Hughes to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Intel Corporation, Bank of America and USAA. For example, Saffron enabled a leading aircraft manufacturer to manage its spare parts inventory for its out-of-production aircraft that was still in service with airline companies.

“A part failure on these airplanes can lead to up to six months of grounding a plane,” says Sheppard. “The airline can lose over a million dollars a day as a result.” After implementing Saffron’s technology, the aircraft manufacturer successfully reduced its service time for its customer service requests from four hours to five minutes and helped create new revenue streams from spare parts that had previously been considered unusable.

Moving forward, Sheppard affirms Saffron's dedication to delivering autonomous learning feedback loops throughout the product lifecycle process from design to manufacturing and distribution and feedback into the initial design stage.

SaffronStreamline™ is our cognitive analytics approach to help manufacturers improve lifecycle management of embedded software in smart products