Itron: Powering Smarter Energy & Water Management

Headquartered in Liberty Lake, Washington, Itron is an American technology company that helps a range of customers—including cities, municipalities, and utilities—effectively manage their energy and water resource management and consumption. The company features an integrated, intelligent platform of end points (such as sensors, meters, and switches) that collect data, control devices, and take action in the field. 

How Itron Turns Data Into Action

Itron’s communication networks harvest that data and deliver it where it’s needed and turn it into insights. With Itron, customers can:

• Achieve more efficient operations
• Ensure system resilience
• Better engage their own consumers
• Keep pace with market demand
• Enhance profitability.

A Company with Global Impact: 100 Countries, 8,000 Cities

Itron currently operates in over 100 countries, serving upwards of 8,000 cities and utility companies in markets all over the world. Its annual revenue for 2023 was $2.2 billion. In recent years, the firm has also emerged as a leader in the smart city movement, which seeks to equip the world’s largest population centers with smart technology that helps boost efficient resource use and sustainable operations. 

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Challenge

The Challenge: Shrinking Visibility on a Growing Supply Chain

Itron manufactures a wide array of technological devices ranging from meters, sensors, and communication modules to grid management tools and streetlight control hardware. Due to the breadth of its products and the scale of its customer base, the organization draws heavily from the electronic component supply chain.

Until mid-2022, Itron was under contract with a well-known parts management software vendor, a partnership that spanned nearly a decade. While the platform had served Itron reasonably well, the company wanted to streamline the way they analyzed their bills of materials (BOMs), gathered data on parts, and implemented derisking strategies. When the opportunity to find an alternative solution appeared, Megan Thalman—a product lifecycle management manager at Itron responsible for carrying out BOM reviews and managing part risk—saw a valuable opportunity for the company to reassess its relationship with the vendor.

"Itron wanted to streamline the way they analyzed their bills of materials (BOMs), gathered data on parts, and implemented derisking strategies."

Thalman Kicks Off a Comprehensive Strategic Review

Thalman and her colleagues decided to conduct a comprehensive strategic review to identify inefficiencies with their vendor and explore whether an alternative solution could deliver better results. 

“I took charge of understanding, ‘What functionalities do we need?’” Thalman recalled. 

In order to be as precise and nuanced as possible in defining what they were looking for in a parts management tool, Thalman mapped out her team’s most essential component database requirements and evaluated the software’s performance in those categories.

Procurement’s Biggest Pain Points

Issues with Concurrent Users

During what would prove a highly clarifying process, Thalman found several areas for improvement regarding the procurement team’s ability to seamlessly track, manage, and analyze parts. Itron felt that multiple professionals—both within the procurement vertical and across other departments and teams—should be able to access and utilize the parts management system at the same time. 

“One of our basic requirements was concurrent users,” she said.

Big Limits on Component Information Requests

Another limitation Thalman came across concerned the search quotas that the incumbent vendor had in place—a maximum number of component information requests that customers could make related to issues like compliance, lifecycle status, and parametric features. 

Another limitation Thalman came across concerned the search quotas that the incumbent vendor had in place...'We were finding that we were meeting our quota with the vendor fairly quickly,' she said.”

“Our AML (Approved Manufacturer List) is fairly large,” Thalman pointed out. As a result, the procurement team drew on the parts database for a lot of data related to those suppliers’ parts. “We were finding that we were meeting our quota with the vendor fairly quickly.”

Too Dependent on Manual Surveying for Part Compliance Info

Finally, Thalman learned that Itron was not able to access product compliance information for its customers with the level of responsiveness that the company believed was crucial to meeting its high standards. Whenever a customer asked whether a specific product was RoHS or REACH [AM1] compliant—to name just two key environmental regulations—the team “would have to do a manual survey every single time,” she said. “It was very time intensive.”

A $2B Company Can’t Afford Supply Chain Intelligence Gaps

From a broader, 10,000-foot perspective, what Itron was asking for was completely understandable for a $2 billion company specializing in devices and hardware made up of myriad electronic components: as much seamless, unimpeded access to parts and supply chain intelligence as possible. 

“We wanted the ability to upload BOMs, return component life cycles, environmental compliance, multi-sourcing risks, commodity segments, and country of origin,” Thalman pointed out. “Basically, anything that we could get our hands on as far as our supply chain goes and any risk that would be associated with our parts and our BOMs.”

What was clear was that the procurement team—and Itron more generally—needed a tool capable of meeting an extensive, multifaceted set of data requirements.