AGCO, the largest pure play, full-line agricultural equipment manufacturer, uses Kapow to automate web data extraction on hundreds of thousands of parts.
Process Automation Solution:
Automated Data Collection
Competitive advantages of real-time, automated data collection & syndication
You compete on the quality, completeness, and timeliness of the data behind the services you provide. With the explosion of data on the web, you must be able to efficiently collect, transform, integrate, and migrate the right data to enhance or create new data services — or risk ceding advantage to a competitor who has better data than you. But extracting web data efficiently and completely is impossible using fragile web-scraping scripts or manual cut-and-paste processes.
Kapow changes the game. With the Kapow Katalyst™ platform you can automatically extract and transform data from virtually any web-based data source, including HTML, XML, AJAX, JSON, Flash, FTP, Excel and PDF. With Kapow's powerful and easy-to-use ETL capabilities, maximize process efficiency and ensure the quality and compatibility of extracted data with your existing information systems. Gone are the days of having to rewrite applications to access their data. And the teams of employees who have been manually cutting-and-pasting web data can now be rededicated from drudgery to driving innovation.
Featured Customer Success Stories in Automated Data Collection:
Challenge
- AGCO's parts division needed to pull data from 10 websites, which sell AGCO parts as well as competitors' products.
- Their existing data feed was inflexible. They got infrequent data dumps, and AGCO had to do a lot of manual work on the product description lists.
- Overall not a very good or agile solution, given that they were extracting hundreds of thousands of parts in a very competitive industry.
Solution
- Kapow provides a fully automated data feed solution, including robots to pull from the 10 key websites and a hosted installation of Kapow running on Amazon EC2.
- Kapow also provides ongoing robot maintenance and support.
- An in-house deployment is planned for the next phase.
Results
- Kapow eliminated manual work associated with web data acquisition.
- Competitive information is up-to-date.
Automating web data extraction was key to expanding business for PPG Industries, the world's leading provider of coatings and specialty products and services.
Challenge
- An insurance company has outsourced its claims department to PPG. PPG handles claims requests from car owners through a call center application.
- PPG needs access to each insurance policy data, which typically resides on a mainframe.
- They are now encountering clients whose data resides in web applications. They need to automate web data extraction and integrate the data with internal systems to replace time consuming manual data processing by call center staff.
Solution
- Kapow robots perform web data extraction automatically.
- Robots are wrapped in web services, which make them easy to integrate into the existing solution.
Results
- Automating web data extraction and integration will result in an estimated 50,000 additional cases from the insurance company.
With Kapow, analysts and traders get real-time information on factors that affect trading price.
Challenge
- In 2007, the EU introduced requirements for greater transparency in the utilities market.
- Organizations affected by the new regulations had to deliver hourly, daily and weekly reports online.
- Deutsche Börse wanted to capture this information in real time to inform trading decisions.
Solution
- With Kapow, they were able to extract and transform data in real time, providing analysts and traders with critical information affecting trading price.
- The solution retrieves information from 150 websites.
Results
- Kapow was the only vendor who could fulfill the requirements in their timeframe.
- “With Kapow, we built powerful fundamental data models. Analysts and traders get critical factors that affect the price of a trade in real-time.” - Mario Schultz, Director, Market Data & Analytics, Deutsche Börse
With Kapow, the energy division of IHS can monitor thousands of sites for factors affecting supply and demand, without relying on offshore resources for web intelligence.
Challenge
- The energy division of IHS needed to monitor thousands of government regulatory product vendor websites for factors that influence oil and gas supply and demand.
- They were relying on off-shore resources to access web data, reducing their control of what is a strategic aspect of their business.
Solution
- With Kapow's automated web data acquisition, they can gather and aggregate critical web information in real time without outsourcing.
- No coding or manual data extraction is required.
Results
- Increased efficiency with automated data extraction.
- Enhanced and improved quality of master data.
- Enhanced product offerings based on better web data.
With Kapow, Live Matrix can extract data from any site to feed their innovative real-time events portal – even content from sites using JavaScript and Ajax.
Challenge
- The Live Matrix site is a real-time events portal, collecting and displaying data on all types of live events, but they had problems extracting content from sites using JavaScript and Ajax.
- They needed to scale quickly.
Solution
- Kapow enables them to extract data from sites using JavaScript and Ajax.
- Kapow's visual scripting environment enabled the Live Matrix developers to scale quickly.
Results
- Based on a successful POC involving 20 challenging sites, Live Matrix decided to move to Kapow for web intelligence.
- With Kapow's state of the art software, Live Matrix met their launch date and became the first TV Guide for the web.
Automating integration of new account information was key to business growth for XING, a leading social networking site for business professionals in Europe.
Challenge
- XING competes with LinkedIn and other social networking sites aimed at business professionals.
- To encourage adoption of their service, they wanted to automate integration of customer account and contact information from LinkedIn, FaceBook, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail to XING's profile and contact databases.
Solution
- With Kapow, a new XING user can enter his third party network credentials into XING's registration form and robots will log into the third party sites and collect all additional profile and contact information to enrich the new XING account.
- Collected contacts that are not currently registered XING users receive an invitation to join XING.
Results
- Customers save time by having all their contact and profile information entered automatically, making the new service instantly useful.
- XING gains valuable marketing information at no cost.