Company
Date Published
Author
Eric Wespi and Eric Spiegelberg
Word count
2889
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

We're going to talk about some project themes that make sense when you're developing a graph project. We'll dive into the business problem and discuss the specifics of the business problem. We are going to cover manufacturing quality, how graphs apply to that problem and how this helped us get some business value through performance improvements and new capabilities. We'll also talk about the evolution of our graph model. We will discuss where it started and where it's going. Boston Scientific is a global medical device company that makes a lot of different therapies aimed at making procedures less invasive and have better outcomes for patients. They make pacemakers, stents, artificial heart valves, diagnostics, and more. The analysis of their supply chain is nothing new, but they've been doing it for years. Recently, they improved the output of the analysis by finding new methods and technologies that could improve the output. Tasked with finding alternatives and improving the methods, they set out to find a solution. They have gained business value by adopting Neo4j, primarily in non-functional areas such as simplicity, explainability, and white-board friendly nature of graphs. The data is much more accessible than it otherwise was. This has increased the efficiency and helped streamline the entire analytical process. The largest value they've gained isn't coming from performance improvements but from these non-functional areas. They've also gained new capabilities through Neo4j such as shortest paths and variable length queries, which have been incredibly useful to their business.