User:YvesChaix

My name is Yves Chaix. I am an IT consultant. I am French and have lived in Nicaragua since 1970.

Among the pleasures of living in Nicaragua in the 80´s, Nicaragua was submitted to an economical embargo by the US for several years. I was at the time the production manager for the only plywood factory in Nicaragua. Because of the embargo, we lost a $500,000 spare parts order (trucks, tractors, skidders, etc.) to Canada which badly affected our operational capacity for several years to come, but this also had the consequence that I started thinking and working on a computer system that would allow to circumvent the embargo by describing ANY spare part as a generic product. I started by building a universal product catalogue, modelled on the industrial transformation chain with 6,000 categories, when the project eventually aborted.

For almost 1,000 of these categories, I studied hundreds of technical vendor manuals to extract the engineering characteristics (attributes) for the category, and the way to validate the values for each attribute (This is known as the Universal Data Model). Then, we built a generic master file to create generic products, and their equivalences with commercial brands, reaching, at the end of the project some 10,000 generic products.

The inventory system (called CASANDRA) was developped by a friend of mine, David Smith, presently deceased, through a volunteer organization called TECNICA, which really supported actively what we were doing, which was at that time quite innovative. It never was really adopted because people preferred to have the opportunity to go and shop in Panama and bring back gifts the family and friends. And it was also quite time consuming to create all these products...

Since then, I have seen a few, actually, very few, B2Bs using this model.One example is <http://uk.rs-online.com/web/search/searchBrowseAction.html?method=retrieveTfg&binCount=85&Ne=4294957561&N=4294962569+4294954334&binCount=85&Ne=4294957561&N=4294962569+4294954334, where the products are actually described by their categories(in this example: Anti vibration mounts, flanged) and their attributes: Load, Base size, Height, Type and Frequency range. Note: this is not an advertisment for RadioSpares; I only know of them by their site, and I am sure they don´t need me for their marketing plans. They actually seem to be doing pretty well on their own. Not even a customer; look at the map.

Their must be other sites using the same model, but to my knowledge, there is no global catalogue for the totality of products produced on Earth (or for that matter, in the Universe! :). I have been told that the present UN catalogue is useless and does not support the attribute paradigm. B2B have that problem: even those that offer intermediary products, are generally specialized in one production line, reason for which they have to have a catalogue of B2Bs :).

Should such a catalogue exist, then all the businesses of the world could actually chain their inventories through the use of a universal generic product master file/propietary product master file. This is a product (ERP) that I intend to develop for the small and medium size business of the world, to help them survive the actual economic crisis. But this is my own axe to grind.

The proposal to Wikimedia is to use the work done so far to create a new project. Something like Wikingineering or Wiking... And have all the experts (usually the retired engineers are very fond of this kind of work) work on transfering their knowledge. It is fairly easy, because the knowledge is structured. The Wikingineering knowledge base would have to be accesible by means of Web services, to provide a unique catalogue for the whole world, consumable by any Web Service based application. The catalogue and the attributes are presently designed to be translated into any language, at least Western characters set.

It exists presently in Spanish, but I am working on an English and French translation. We could include the generic product master file as part of the Wiki too and all the venders of the world could create both their generic products and their own propietary ones. The largest repository on Earth!

Regards

YvesChaix 19:49, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

skype: yveschaix54158