A BRIGHTPLANET CASE STUDY

Phillips Plastics manufactures high-quality plastic components for a highly diverse range of products in the medical, computer and electronic fields. Products range from small parts to product cases using plastic, metal and magnesium injection molding.

Phillips offers complete in-house design facilities providing a full range of product design capabilities using state-of-the art computer-assisted design technologies supporting complex modeling, 3-D rendering, and sophisticated simulation technology. Phillips Plastics serves specific customer requirements in low or high volume quantities from conceptual design to full-scale production.

The Problem 

With such powerful design and manufacturing capabilities and such a broad diversity of applications, staying on top of industry developments is paramount, but is a monstrous task. It requires the monitoring of many related industries, technology developments and potential partners. While information is quickly available via the Internet, it is so widely spread and difficult to sift from the huge amounts of clutter that Phillips researchers were drowning in unrelated, non-useful information.

BrightPlanet Solution

To cut through all the chaff and noise, Phillips uses BrightPlanet’s Deep Query ManagerTM (DQM) to help keep abreast of industry developments. DQM is a powerful search platform that allows their users to search hundreds or thousands of search sources (search engines, directories and Deep Web databases) in each harvest. Documents are returned to allow further analysis while duplicates, mis-indexed documents and clutter are excluded. Accepted documents are scored for relevance to the query and sorted in a bestdocuments-first order.

In particular, Phillips has found DQM’s Difference Analysis and Scheduling functions very valuable for monitoring their industry. The Scheduling feature allows Phillips to schedule periodic harvests of the Internet on a weekly basis.

Company Benefits

The Difference Analysis feature saves Phillips enormous amounts of time. For sake of example, let’s assume a weekly harvest researching a topic returns 1,800 documents. The same harvest scheduled for the following week may return 1,804 documents. The difference between the two runs arises because there are five new documents, one prior document no longer exists on the Web, and two documents have been modified. Poring over 1,804 documents to find the five new and two modified documents can take hours or even days depending upon document size and degree of thoroughness required. New and modified documents are automatically identified by DQM. The user only needs to review those seven documents during the second week’s harvest to see what is new or changed.

Thereafter, week after week, users only need review new and changed documents. Phillips personnel accomplish this task in a fraction of the time with the assurance that all new and modified documents have been found. In addition, because the search can be scheduled to run automatically week after week, the scope of each search can be far more comprehensive by accessing hundreds or thousands of sources. However, the most important reason to introduce a new technology into any business is opportunities gained or resources saved. According to Phillips’ primary researcher, Diane Flaherty, "DQM saves me two or more hours every day."

DQM's schedule interface is shown below:

 Additional Features:

• Access to tens of thousands of additional search sources
• Comparing (differencing) of multiple harvest results (including other user’s results if desired)
• Archiving full document results for permanent record
• Local searching for new information within archived results
• Extensive inclusion and exclusion term filtering
• Extensive inclusion and exclusion domain filtering
• Modified document comparisons highlighting added and deleted text
• Search Web sites that don’t have their own site search facility