A small-to-mid-sized industrial manufacturer in the energy sector — a hidden champion in medium- and high-voltage components, recently acquired by a private equity investor — needed to understand what was really driving supplier pricing across its turned-parts category.
The challenge was not the analytics. It was the data environment: commercial spend lived in SAP, technical drawings lived in disconnected engineering systems, and retrieving files meant manual part-by-part lookups. Drawings ranged from modern digital formats to handwritten documents dating back to 1995.
COVALYZE PartIQ digitized the 50 highest-spend parts and extracted structured geometry, material, and process parameters. COVALYZE Analytics then linked that technical data to ERP spend and supplier records — quantifying, for the first time, which variables actually drove price variation. The result: piece quantity alone accounted for 33% of the total price effect, confirmed to 1% accuracy. Approximately 50 raw material spec variants were harmonized into 10 material classes, and €29,000 in savings potential was identified across an average annual spend of €350,000.
What began as a focused cost exercise became the foundation for a broader transformation — expanding into additional categories, assembly-level analytics, and an enterprise-wide technical data digitization case for the PE investor.
