Somewhere in your vault is a bracket that has been designed three times. The original was released years ago and is used in fourteen assemblies, the second one has a flange two millimeters taller, and the third added a hole. Each one got its own drawing, its own qualification, its own supplier, and its own stock location, and nobody ever decided to triple the cost of that bracket. It happened because finding the original was harder than redrawing it.
Exact-name search is why. A PDM can find BRKT-2210 if you know to type BRKT-2210, but the engineer who needs an M8 stainless angle bracket does not know the number, so they ask a colleague, find nothing, and model a new one. Every new part number makes the next search harder, and manual cleanup projects never catch up with the rate of creation.
Search Before You Design
bananaz makes the search as easy as describing the part. Ask in plain language for a released M8 stainless angle bracket, 3 mm thick, or filter by PDM metadata like material, revision, and state, and bananaz searches your vault and shelf catalog and returns ranked matches with similarity scores.
Then comes the part no search box can do. The closest candidates are compared in 3D with every difference shown, so the decision is made on facts rather than squinting at thumbnails. The released part matches on material, thickness, and hole size but the flange is 40 mm where you need 45, and now the engineer can choose with full information, whether that is reusing the released part, adapting the near miss, or confirming a new part is genuinely needed.
New Part Numbers Become the Exception
Each reuse avoids a drawing, a qualification, and a supplier, and the savings compound across the lifecycle in fewer stock items, fewer duplicate quotes, and fewer orphaned designs. Just as important, finding parts stops depending on the memory of whoever has been there longest, which means the knowledge stays even when people move on.
The part list stops growing, and new parts happen by exception instead of by accident.
Want to see what is already in your vault? Book a demo with one of our AI consultants.
