Mareana: Enhancing Data Visibility

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Chris Knerr, CEO

To remain competitive, manufacturing and supply chain companies are evolving through the adoption of new technologies, systems, and analytics. We see our readers using these new tools to increase data visibility, and improve decision making to expand overall profitability. In this interview with CIO Applications, Chris Knerr, CEO of Mareana, discusses how robust analytics platforms and solutions empower clients to transform unstructured data into synchronized and usable data to achieve greater business value.

Give us an overview of Mareana and the value it brings to its clients.

Founded in 2014, Mareana is a big data and advanced analytics company that has developed a proprietary technology platform, called qSuite, focused on unstructured data, data interoperability, and data science for the life sciences and manufacturing industries. First, we reverse engineer unstructured data, such as PDF’s, engineering drawings, and batch records, using machine learning to glean insights and drive business results. Second, our technology improves data interoperability within or across data silos even when the data is messy. Further, our data science helps companies to create value from the data through advanced modeling and analytics.

Mareana’s technology is specifically tailored to industries and functions that deal with large amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sets spread across multiple systems. Our customers represent the life sciences, chemical, and general industrial manufacturing industries in various functions including, supply chain, regulatory affairs, quality operations, clinical, finance, commercial/pricing operations, and product lifecycle management.

Poor data visibility and lack of meaningful metrics are major challenges that global manufacturing and supply chain firms face today. To assist clients in overcoming these challenges, Mareana has developed a supply chain visibility solution that pulls master, transactional, and unstructured data from different sources; creates data interoperability; and analyzes the data to surface actionable business insights.

Provide us details of the core functionalities of qSuite.

qSuite is Mareana’s business data orchestration and machine learning platform that comprises four major modules—qFind, qSync, qArt, and qSci.

Mareana has developed a supply chain visibility solution that essentially pulls data from different, but relevant, sources, creates data interoperability, and analyzes data to surface actionable business insights

qFind aids firms in general data visibility applying an auto classification process – a Google-like search on all enterprise data. qSync is the data interoperability engine that synchronizes and unifies unstructured and structured data. qArt constitutes the third module which helps customers understand the assets they possess in regulated labeling and package artwork files and optimizes highly variable image-based unstructured data. Finally, qSci is an industrialized machine learning, data science, and mathematical modeling workbench, which we typically use to provide clients with more sophisticated analysis to improve growth, cost, and quality business outcomes.

We have made significant investments in handwriting analysis capabilities over the last year. This is especially useful for life science firms where most of the product manufacturing batch records are handwritten. Our handwriting feature can read, recognize and convert handwritten batch records to greatly streamline the FDA regulated Continued Batch Verification process.

From an IT perspective, our entire product suite is based on service-oriented architecture. Mareana provides both cloud-based and on-premise versions and has various implementation and ongoing support models.

Can you share with us a case study highlighting the benefits brought to one of your clients?

One of our clients, a global company medical device company, wanted to improve their customer service cycle time on product inquiries. Their current process requires customer service representatives to search large printed product catalogs for information while customers wait on hold. We deployed qFind and qSync to digitize and make searchable the product catalogs, which 1) Significantly enabled the customer service representatives to provide product information accurately and quickly and 2) As an additional benefit, aided in aligning their marketing catalogs, basic ERP data, and product-related data yielding positive results. Additionally, our solutions assisted to automatically syndicate their product data to the customer’s website. With Mareana’s technology, the client improved the customer experience by streamlining the customer service and providing reliable, accurate and comprehensive product information instantly at the CSR's fingertips.

Can you shed some light on recent your track record and achievements?

One of our main achievements is our sales growth, which has doubled every year since inception. More importantly, our success is evidenced by the value we help our customers create and the long-term relationships we have forged as our technology expands into their organizations.

Where do you see yourself heading in the near future?

Our future plans are focused on rolling out qSuite to enable digital manufacturing plants, and digitize quality operations and regulatory affairs. We are also investing heavily in our product road map and capabilities and boosting our sales team.