August 2, 2005  |  Imaginestics to optimize manufacturer's supply chain

Purdue Research Park, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A - Imaginestics, a leading design reuse management software solutions company for discrete manufacturing, was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I grant as part of NSF's Manufacturing Innovation grant competition.

The grant will be used to develop technology that will streamline search and retrieval of product information across the manufacturer's supply chain. In addition, the technology will optimize the reuse of purchased parts across multiple product platforms for manufacturers, saving billions in duplicate parts, redesign work, unused inventory, redundant tooling costs, and wasted man-hours in non-productive search.

Imaginestics plans to use 3D shape search technology as the basis for parts search across the supply chain to alleviate the inherent problems with textual descriptions, such as user bias and language and context sensitivity issues. The research will be an expansion of the earlier work done by Dr. Karthik Ramani, Purdue Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Director of PRECISE (Purdue Research & Education Center for Information Systems in Engineering) in this area, which is patent pending. Imaginestics has licensed the technology from Purdue.

"It's basically the difference between describing a complex part to someone versus just showing it to them," said Nainesh Rathod, President/CEO of Imaginestics. He continued, "We are excited at the prospects of this technology providing significant value to manufacturers for optimizing the supply chain."

About Imaginestics
Imaginestics (www.Imaginestics.com) is the emerging leader in Design Reuse Management (DRM) systems for the manufacturing and life sciences industry. DRM is the process of applying current and legacy design knowledge at the point of application so that it can be processed when it is useful. Imaginestics' product suite includes i-advisor, an engineering advisory system; i-config, an enterprise-wide product configurator; 3D-Config, an interactive and configurable online parts catalog; and i-compare, an intelligent design content extraction, matching, and locator tool.