Essilor’s Knowledge Graph for Global Supply Chain Risk Management

Essilor, part of the EssilorLuxottica SA group (which sells global brands such as Ray-Ban, Oakley and Varilux among many others), is a French-based vertically integrated, multinational ophthalmic optics company and the world leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of lenses to correct or protect eyesight. Including sundries, Essilor carries hundreds of thousands of stock and finished products that are fabricated at many different labs in different countries and are sold all over the world.

“Tracking product packaging and fulfilling orders efficiently had always been difficult in the past,” said Mel Yuson, Director Enterprise Architecture, Essilor AMERA. “We tried to modernize our product tracking system with 3rd party software solutions and in-house relational database applications but without success because relational databases lack the ability to model complex relationships. We needed the freedom of a schemaless graph database, like Franz’s AllegroGraph, which uniquely provides us the flexibility to evolve our data model and seamlessly add new applications to address rapid growth and changing needs at Essilor.”

Here is a sliver of the complex data model of the Essilor application viewed in Gruff.

“We developed and deployed to production our first AllegroGraph based application in only a few months after engaging Franz,” said Yuson. “We found AllegroGraph’s W3C standard SPARQL query language is much easier to use than SQL but most importantly, AllegroGraph is a very stable and highly scalable platform with its Multi-Master Replication cluster feature. Today, we deploy several AllegroGraph servers in the cloud, which easily handle 100,000 concurrent queries per minute at peak hours. We are very pleased with our partnership with Franz Inc. and are believers in the power of Semantic Graph Database technology.”

System architecture at Essilor