May 18, 2005

For the past couple of years, Open Ratings has been providing information to B2B companies about suppliers and other businesses they wish to conduct trade with.

Open Ratings' new Data Fusion (tm) solution updates various company data by adding more complex information about suppliers, and offering buyers more-in-depth analytics for decision support, while at the same time better protecting companies from businesses which would be harder to evaluate using more traditional methods.

Open Ratings has long been able to tap into supplier information from such sources as Dun & Bradstreet. But that's just the beginning.

Jim Lawton, VP of marketing for the company, says that it can tell if suppliers have EPA/OSHA violations, are on government debarment lists, or have suits, liens, or legal judgments against them. The Open Ratings taps into various government databases, all the way down to county courthouses, to get some of this information.

Based on this data, Lawton says, Open Ratings can predict the future performance of a supplier. "We predict 96 percent of bankruptcies," he claims. "We use predictive intelligence to understand the future performance of a company."

The underlying premise is that, because Open Ratings can analyze thousands of experiences that a particular supplier has had with other customers, there is a large enough sample space for sound extrapolation. This is important because, as Lawton notes, "the time between a supplier runs into issues and when it hits your financials is shrinking."

Source: Line 56