Company News | XSB

U.S. GSA Employs Price Point to Help Address Inflationary Procurement Challenges

XSB — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 21:49:02 +0000

Public sector suppliers and buyers are being challenged to keep up with inflationary changes. Erv Koehler, Assistant Commissioner of GSA’s Office of General Supplies and Services recently announced that it will rely on data from XSB’s Price Point tool to support Contracting Officers in making price adjustment decisions driven by inflationary changes. Learn more about this and GSA’s other long term procurement priorities in Federal News Network’s blog and podcast.

Digital Models in Department of Defense Procurement

XSB — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 17:50:20 +0000

The United States Department of Defense manages one of the largest procurement budgets in the world. Of the department’s $700 Billion annual budget, more than $200 billion is spent on goods and services from contractors.1 Purchases run the gamut from aircraft carriers to combat boots.

There are enormous challenges in procuring this array of goods and services with the right level of quality and speed while stewarding taxpayer dollars. One branch of the Department of Defense, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), is turning to digital models from XSB to reduce the cost, time, and errors associated with PDF-based procurement.

Defense Logistics Agency

The Defense Logistics Agency, the nation’s combat logistics support agency, manages the end-to-end global defense supply chain for the five military services. DLA procures more than $46 billion annually across several supply chains: subsistence (food/water), clothing and textiles, bulk petroleum and other energy products, construction material and equipment, personal demand items, medical material and equipment, and repair parts for land, sea and air systems.

DLA’s Clothing and Textile department manages more than $1.3 billion in demand for nearly 5000 Clothing and Individual Equipment items. Consider, for example, the Army Combat Uniform (ACU). The ACU is a complex garment incorporating camouflage, chemical treatments, fire retardant, NIR Signature management technology, and permanent IR IFF squares for identification with night goggles–just to name a few features designed to keep our soldiers safe and healthy.

The Problem

The requirements to procure, manufacture and test the ACU are distributed across a web of related, but disconnected, technical documents including Specifications and Standards, Purchase Descriptions (PD), and other Technical Data Packages (TDP) with multiple Interim Changes. Product technical requirements are derived from documents authored inside (e.g., Military specs) and outside the Government (e.g., Non-Government Standards from ASTM, AATCC, and NFPA, etc.). These technical documents vary in age from thirty-year-old scanned PDFs, to more modern Microsoft Word and XML Documents. The purchase description for the ACU has references to 98 documents and 5053 pages from 13 document sources.

ACU Network of Requirements Documents
Different stakeholders including the military services, DLA Product and Contract Specialists, Government and industry testing labs, and suppliers to the government must find and use the requirements embedded in these documents. The documents are rich with technical information but were made for printing and reading. They are poor containers for technical data. They are not interoperable, and their uneven format makes it difficult for users to search, query, use, reuse, update, edit and manage. The problem is further complicated as different stakeholder groups establish multiple, independent collections of these documents on network drives, Microsoft SharePoint instances, on their local desktops, and even paper in folders.

Requirements in traditional documents are stored as static and disconnected objects, but they represent a dynamic web of concepts distributed across an ever-changing network managed by different authorities. The disconnected nature of a document-based approach makes tech data management difficult and can result in decisions based on inconsistent, incomplete, and out-of-date information. Different Clothing & Textile division stakeholders use the same information to perform different tasks during the product life cycle. A Product Specialist may support a military service by inserting contract-specific Interim Changes into an item requirement. In response, the manufacturer needs to alter a factory work instruction to ensure the finished product includes these changes. An industry test lab must change a First Article Test Plan to reflect the revised requirement. The DLA Product Test Center needs to know the impact of that change is reflected in manufacturer test reports. The problem with this disconnected document approach is that changes to one document are poorly communicated to other document stakeholders.

The Solution: TexSpecs

The DLA turned to XSB to help them create TexSpecs: “interoperable structured digital models of purchase descriptions, interim changes, and other specification-based technical documents which reduces the cost, time, and errors associated with PDF-based tech data management.”2

DLA’s transformation to a Model-Based Enterprise results in improved decision making and increased confidence that a design will perform as expected. This Model-Based approach enables users to query, edit, and analyze technical data that was previously locked in the document format. Linking the concepts within and between documents provides powerful change management and configuration control mechanisms. According to Deloitte, this approach can generate up to 65% process cost savings. It also helps DLA’s Clothing & Textile stakeholders avoid mistakes and rework resulting from decisions made with out-of-date information.

A Closer Look

XSB helped DLA convert documents from 13 different sources to interoperable, linked data models using Artificial Intelligence and semantic technology. The collection of these former documents, now models, is stored as a knowledge base, or graph, and is called the Digital Model Library (DML). The knowledge graph establishes a single, enduring, authoritative source of truth that captures the state, history, and relationships between tech data sources. Changes made to a document model in the DML propagate throughout all affected data and systems, ensuring stakeholders have accurate and up-to-date information. This Model-Based digital thread is the product DNA for the management of the associated clothing and individual equipment items. Digital models of Clothing & Textile documents provide many advantages over PDF documents:

consistent and instantaneous integration of Interim Changes
enhanced configuration management across stakeholders,
Automated and rapid analysis to ensure compliance with government procurement procedures and interoperability with other digital models from Government and Industry.
In addition, digital models can be exported as MS Word documents enabling the Agency to retain its traditional, document-based processes and workflows while undergoing digital transformation.

The knowledge graph, or DML, can be accessed by humans through a Web browser, or by machines and systems through a powerful Application Programming Interface (API). The DML now contains 146 Purchase Descriptions, 620 Government Specifications, Standards, and Commercial Item Descriptions, and 2130 Non-Government Standards from ASTM, AATCC, and others.

1 The Department of Defense (DOD) An Orientation November 12, 2021

2 DLA C&T Modernization Efforts with DLA MUST Program TexSpecs& SRP Tool Brief for Joint Advanced Planning Brief to Industry (JAPBI)

XSB Team Wins Best in Show for World Standards Day Paper Competition

XSB — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 21:49:38 +0000

A team from XSB including CEO, Rupert Hopkins, board member Bob Solomon, and Andrew Bank won the award for best paper in the 2022 World Standards Day paper competition. Their paper, entitled “The Next Generation of Engineering Standards: A Proposal for Digital Transformation”, addresses the shortcomings of legacy PDF engineering documents and industry standards and proposes a technical solution to benefit all parties involved including standards developers, enterprise software providers, standards end-users, manufacturers, and others involved in the engineering supply chain.

Their solution, called digital twin documents, builds on the familiar concept of the model-based enterprise. Digital twins were born during the 1990s as 2D part drawings were transformed into 3D CAD models, resulting in dramatic productivity improvements in design and manufacturing.

A digital twin document is a standardized data-centric representation of a flat-text document in which each of the data elements — such as text, tables, graphs, equations, images, requirements, and more — are transformed into individual, interoperable, and reusable data points, connected in a network of references and related concepts. These data points are aware of their position in the network, their status (active, inactive, superseded, etc.), and their relationship to other data points, and can therefore communicate to end users about changes and the impact of those changes on other parts, materials, or processes. SWISS digital twin documents are structured sets of data that are machine readable and even machine interpretable. The authors believe that in the near future, engineering documents and industry standards will be read and interpreted as much by machines as by humans.

Digital twin documents can enable a new world of capabilities and value-added benefits that are impossible to achieve with PDF files and like their CAD counterparts, they will jumpstart another massive wave of productivity gains.

You can read the full paper in the Standardization Journal at the link below. Please share it with your colleagues and let us know your thoughts.

Read the full paper here.

The World Standards Day Paper Competition is sponsored by SES – The Society for Standards Professionals.

XSB Collaborates with PTC’s Windchill PLM to Close Product Information Gaps

XSB — Sat, 01 May 2021 21:50:19 +0000

New Windchill PLM Extension Integrates Critical External Data to Reduce Manual Labor, Accelerate Time-to-Market, and Lower Operational Costs

Setauket, NY and Boston, MA. May 4, 2021. XSB, a semantic data science company and member of the PTC Partner Network, today announced the release of the SWISS Connect Extension for the Windchill® Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software from PTC (NASDAQ: PTC). SWISS Connect harmonizes internal and external engineering data used within the aerospace and defense, textile, electronics, and automotive industries to reduce quality control problems and related delays due to referencing cancelled or inactive product specifications.

Operating as a bridge between PLM workflows and external content, SWISS Connect establishes change-aware connections between documents stored in Windchill and referenced external standards and specifications, automating the integration of required product and manufacturing information (PMI). The extension also significantly minimizes the time and manual labor previously required for change management and impact analysis, sometimes cutting validation times from hours or days to minutes.

“XSB and PTC have mutual PLM customers in the federal, aerospace, and defense verticals,” said Dave Duncan, Vice President of Product Management, Industrial Digital Thread Solutions, PLM Segment, PTC. “With this integration, our customers can easily link to the specs and standards referenced in their designs, enabling them to improve productivity and filling an important void in the digital thread. More importantly, engineers can be alerted when their referenced specs and standards change so they can determine if their designs need to adapt to those changes. We’re pleased with this new closed-loop quality connection to enhance our PLM offering.”

Enterprise documents, such as part, material, and process specifications, purchase descriptions, work instructions, and technical data packages contain references to a variety of internal and external standards and specifications. These references – and the critical data within them – are difficult to access because they are merely static PDF file attachments rather than integral parts of the digital thread. Since most engineering work is conducted on digital platforms, these disconnected silos of mission-critical information add cost, time, and risk to the product lifecycle.

Tanya Vidrevich, COO of XSB said, “By teaming with PTC, XSB is able to bring actionable engineering data, once locked in static legacy documents, into the digital product lifecycle; this integration establishes the SWISS open standard as an integral part of the Model Based Enterprise.”

The SWISS Connect Extension is now available in the Windchill Extension center at: https://windchill-extensions.ptc.com/.
About XSB, Inc.

XSB, Inc. is a semantic data science company known for its SWISS digital model data platform, which transforms static documents (such as MS Word and PDF) from standalone “dead-text” to a networked collection of interoperable, “change aware” data elements — text, tables, graphs, equations, and images. The underlying network of documents, data, concepts, and the relationships between them is organized in the SWISS Knowledge Graph which can be queried from other applications via the SWISS API. SWISS was developed in part with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense (Defense Standardization Program and Defense Logistics Agency) and support from major Standards Development Organizations and aerospace & defense companies.

https://xsb.com/swiss

Contact: Andrew Bank (a.bank@xsb.com)

Windchill is a registered trademark of PTC Inc. and/or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

How the GSA Verified Products Portal, Developed by XSB, Will Improve the Federal eCommerce Buying and Selling Experience

XSB — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 19:04:12 +0000

The GSA Catalog Management team has shared some exciting updates on the release of the Verified Product Portal (VPP), a key component of GSA’s Catalog Management modernization, which has been under development by XSB since June. The prototype was released in November and full implementation is slated for Q2 2021.

The VPP, a manufacturer and wholesaler facing portal, is poised to Improve GSA’s buying and selling experience by providing access to authoritative product content, including standardized manufacturer names, part numbers, and specification data for COTS items of supply. The VPP will also support automated supplier authorization enforcement, ensuring items of supply can only be offered by approved supply sources.

Read the full news item

XSB, Inc. Selected as a Program Partner for the DLA Weapon System Sustainment Program (WSSP)

XSB — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 19:14:49 +0000

NEW YORK – July 1, 2020 – XSB, Inc. announced today that it has been selected as a program partner to collaborate with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) in identifying logistics problems, and developing new capabilities and innovative business practices to support the agency’s Weapon System Support Program (WSSP).

XSB received a 5-year indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract, structured as a 1-year base period with four 1-year options. The contract has a ceiling of $35M. Projects associated with the contract will be awarded as Task Orders; each having a defined scope, period of performance and funding.

“XSB has been a trusted R&D partner of DLA for nearly two decades,” said Rupert Hopkins, XSB’s CEO. “We understand that the Defense community faces unique lifecycle challenges. We are delighted to have the opportunity to continue to support DLA in identifying and implementing new capabilities to ensure quality and reduce risk across the supply chain.”

The mission of the WSSP, a DLA sponsored Research & Development effort, is to provide improved capabilities and methods for delivery of millions of weapons systems parts and services to DLA’s customers. WSSP partners work closely with stakeholders to improve internal DLA processes, provide new tools and methods, reduce costs and lead times, and ultimately improve warfighter support across multiple weapon systems and supply chains.

ABOUT XSB Inc.

XSB Inc. is a New York-based software provider of “Systems of Intelligence” solutions based on the attributes of manufactured products, such as parts, materials, processes, or even prices.

The Company’s applications use artificial intelligence (AI) to combine and standardize proprietary data sources internal to an organization, open data, and commercial data. The technology enables people, organizations, and machines to understand, share, and act upon large amounts of data and complex concepts.

The result is a dramatic savings of time and cost, reduced supply chain risk, and improved outcomes for Public Sector Procurement, Supply Chain Management and Engineering Document Automation.

For more information visit XSB.com.

Media Contact: press@xsb.com

GSA Awards Contract to Data Enrichment Provider XSB to Build Out the Verified Products Portal (VPP)

XSB — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 19:15:39 +0000

The Catalog Management team is sharing some news about a related project, the Verified Product Portal (VPP), which will be a critical piece of the long term Catalog Management solution.

The VPP will be a manufacturer and wholesaler facing portal designed to host authoritative product content, including standardized manufacturer names, part numbers, and specifications. This syndicated content, provided directly from the manufacturers and other verified sources, includes images, product videos, and pdf documents for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products.

Read the full news item

XSB, Inc. Secures Defense Logistics Agency Project Extension in Additive Manufacturing

XSB — Sat, 06 Jun 2020 19:15:15 +0000

NEW YORK – June 30, 2020 – XSB Inc., a software provider of artificial intelligence solutions in manufacturing, logistics and engineering document automation, announced today the extension of the Company’s current contract with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) to develop an Additive Manufacturing Candidate Identification Tool for production use by DLA and the Military Services.

Currently, DLA manages data on millions of legacy parts used in manufacturing yet has no way to efficiently determine if Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, is a viable alternate production process. XSB has been tasked with creating and enhancing a tool – Additive Manufacturing Initial General Assessment (AMIGA) – that enables DLA procurement and engineering specialists to sort through the millions of candidate parts and make an initial determination of their suitability for AM in a fraction of the time.

DLA stakeholders must manually evaluate logistics and technical data for millions of parts to determine which can be produced using AM; this is a particularly hard problem as this determination depends on both DLA internal data and external commercial data sources. XSB aims to solve this problem using AI through the AMIGA tool. AMIGA automatically assesses the physical and logistical properties of parts and AM machines to answer the questions of: Can a part be made using Additive Manufacturing, and should it be? XSB’s tool evaluates a part’s production lead time, the cost based on various sources, stocking issues, source manufacturers, part size, and part material. It also evaluates where the part will be used to determine any critical safety issues that may impact a part’s suitability to be produced using Additive Manufacturing processes.

“AM represents a transformative approach to industrial production, but it has limitations, states XSB’s Founder and CEO Rupert Hopkins. “AMIGA and XSB’s AI-based approach will significantly improve efficiency, reduce errors and increase DLA warfighter readiness.”

For more information on AMIGA, please visit our Aerospace & Defense Industries page.

Media Contact: press@xsb.com

XSB, Inc. Awarded Phase I SBIR Grant as part of NASA’s $45M Investment in US Small Businesses for Space Tech Development

XSB — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 19:16:23 +0000

XSB, Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a NASA Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to research interoperability between SysML and XSB’s SWISS® platform, as part of NASA’s larger Moon to Mars exploration approach. XSB, a first-time NASA SBIR recipient, is one of hundreds of small businesses and research institutions across the United States whose innovative ideas have been recognized and funded by NASA.

SWISS uses an ontology-based linked data model to describe the syntax and semantics of Specification and Standards documents. SWISS enables the creation of smart connected models using this information. The DoD and a number of the leading Original Equipment Manufacturers in the A&D sector are already using or exploring SWISS to model their specifications.

Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate said “We are excited about the entrepreneurial, innovative ideas that these small businesses are bringing to the table. The technologies show great promise in helping NASA achieve its objectives across all mission areas.”

“Our goal is to support engineering organizations who will be participating in NASA’s cis-lunar infrastructure development.” said Tanya Vidrevich, XSB’s COO and the Technical Lead on this project. “Descriptions of system requirements, parametrics, structure and behavior will come in various forms, such as SysML models, or NASA, Industry and proprietary Specifications and Standards. Integration between SysML and SWISS models will enable interoperability and provide improved checking and analysis across multiple sources of models and Specifications; this is truly disruptive technology and we are so pleased that NASA sees promise in what we are working on.”

NASA’s SBIR and STTR programs encourage small businesses and research institutions to develop innovative ideas that meet the specific research and development needs of the federal government. The programs are intended to stimulate technological innovation in the private sector, increase the commercial application of research results, and encourage participation of socially and economically disadvantaged persons and women-owned small businesses. For more information about NASA’s investment in space technology, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/spacetech

“Integrating “Smart Documents” into PLM and the Digital Thread” at Northrop Grumman

XSB — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 19:16:53 +0000

Bruce Mayer, Manager, Engineering Application Technology and Strategy of Northrop Grumman presented “Integrating “Smart Documents” into PLM and the Digital Thread” at CIMdata’s PLM Road Map™& PDT North America 2019 conference last month. Bruce’s presentation is based on his experience with XSB’s SWISS solution.

The following is an overview of Bruce’s presentation:

We have all encountered documents which “refer” to other documents. What if one document could actually “talk” to another document? A document which talks could tell others that reference it that something changed! That table copied into a drawing would “know” that the values in the source document have changed! What if the manufacturing BOM or bill of process could raise a flag when the material specification for that widget has changed? Think of the time, frustration, and money that can be saved. Making documents talk to each other is the definition of “Smart Connected Documents” and when coupled with PLM is a game changing combination. This presentation will relate details of Northrop Grumman’s experience with the application of a Smart Connected Documents engine to product definition and manufacturing instruction documentation. The presentation will start with the challenge, describe the journey, and will finish with a summary of the benefits received and lessons learned from the experience.

Download the entire presentation here.

Bruce Mayer is the Engineering Application Technology and Strategy Manager for Northrop Grumman Mission Systems Sector, located outside Baltimore, Maryland. He has been with Northrop Grumman for 30+ years in a variety of roles including the head of the engineering application support organization where he was responsible for providing technical expertise for over 150 applications necessary to tackle technology challenges. In his current role, Bruce is responsible for evaluating and deploying strategic technologies in support of the Model-Based Enterprise. Bruce has spent much of his career focused on application automation and technology insertion. He holds a BS degree in Computer and Information Systems.