Performing research and development on the design of new data supply chains is tricky. There are multiple emerging technologies at any given time, and testing new applications and tools (like AI) is a process that involves multiple experiments to improve the varied components of these complex, multiple-stage processes. These efforts can take a long time to complete and require a firm’s best and brightest managers, so they often wind up on the back burner, and sometimes never to move to the front burner.
At Information Evolution our R&D department is open to our customers so they can try out their process improvement ideas without risking their core mission to serve their customers. We learn from these initiatives and can apply newly designed process ideas to other data supply chains to improve them as well.
One example of this type of synergy is our NAICS assignment tool. On one project we were spending a fair amount of time applying industry codes manually, so we researched whether there were AI tools and methods that could improve our through-put. We succeeded and then were able to apply the new mechanism to other projects that had other types of taxonomy assignment subprocesses.
Other types of R&D work that we perform free of charge for our customers:
- Design and testing of new data-gathering processes
- Telephone research script variations
- Defining ’low confidence’ stages of data processes in order to apply targeted QA resources to them
We are aware of no other firm that offers access to this kind of “skunk works” R&D lab to their customers. So, reach out for help improving your problematically slow or inefficient processes. IEI has a proven track record, and the resources to change them for the better.
