Case study: Measuring ‘factoryless’ manufacturing with glass.ai company research.

There is an increasing trend towards contract — factoryless — manufacturing, where a company contracts the use of a manufacturing capability owned by someone else. The most famous example of this is Apple’s iPhone “Designed in California” which is the product of outsourced development across a complex supply chain. In the UK, Dyson does not produce any of its household products itself. This, however, presents a significant challenge to producing economic statistics on manufacturing. For example, studies for the US economy have shown that reclassifying factoryless manufacturers from services to manufacturing can lead to a significant increase in manufacturing output and employment.

A recent study by The National Institute Of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and the University of Cambridge has explored this problem using a combination of official statistics and data sourced from the web by glass.ai. Although there have been some specific surveys looking into production that takes place in service industry companies, it has proved very hard to understand the impact of contract manufacturing on the economy at large. This is where open web data has a part to play.

As a demonstration of the glass.ai large scale language understanding capability, the glass.ai engine has read and mapped a very large part of the UK and US economies based on its web presence. It has identified and regularly reads the websites of over 7 million UK and US businesses across sectors and geographies. It reads and structures all the text on the websites, including company descriptions, people, news and job listings. Natural language processing techniques are used to extract topics using an extensive topic ontology that describes the activities that are being performed by the businesses. These are combined with other criteria to assign industry sectors to each business. This allows market research and deep grained segmentation to be performed based on very rich data read from the web. This company research data set is made available as open access via the research.glass.ai web application.

The NIESR and University of Cambridge study used the glass.ai open research app to find companies in the UK and US that mention contract manufacturer and related activities suggested by the glass.ai topic ontology. Using this tool, the study discovered 491 organisations in the UK and 2,534 in the US that are involved in contract manufacturing.

Top sectors involved in contract manufacturing.

The study was specifically interested in measuring the industry sectors involved in contract manufacturing. Using the sectors assigned to these companies by the glass.ai engine, this analysis highlighted a different balance between the use of contract manufacturing in the UK and the US. The top UK sector was the Chemical sector whereas in the US the top sector was Electrical and Electronic Manufacturing.

Top locations of companies involved in contract manufacturing.

The glass.ai company research also highlights breakdowns by other criteria such as geography, topics, people roles, news and job listings. In addition, it provides access to the underlying data from which you are able to download samples of the results for review — something the factoryless manufacturing study used to validate the results.

The factoryless manufacturing study demonstrates that structured data extracted from the web can be extremely valuable in investigating, measuring and understanding non-traditional business models, in addition to other known use cases around emerging technologies and markets not well understood by official data. Each of these are hard to investigate using traditional company data sources. The glass.ai company research addresses this need by providing a deep understanding of the text read from company websites and structuring this into a form that is easy to query, view and understand.

You can try the glass.ai market research app yourself here: research.glass.ai.