Redwood Shores, CA December 11, 2002 High-tech manufacturer Intersil has turned to a supply chain solution from e-business giant Oracle in a bid to improve its supply chain agility and its responsiveness to changes in customer demand.
Milpitas, Calif.-based Intersil designs and manufactures high performance analog and wireless networking solutions, as well as CD and DVD recordable disk drives and flat panel displays. The company has operations across the United States and in Europe, as well as offices in Asia.
Like other companies in the rough-and-tumble tech market, Intersil is continuously looking for ways to improve its processes, according to Don Cross, director of operations planning and customer service at the manufacturer. "As the world's leading supplier of high performance analog and wireless networking chip sets, Intersil is constantly striving to improve its competitive advantage through innovative business processes," Cross said.
Looking to sharpen its competitive edge, the company recently implemented Oracle's advanced planning and demand planning solutions, part of the provider's e-Business Suite.
Since going live with the solution about four months ago, Intersil said it has gained greater visibility across its global supply chain for accurately predicting customer demand, supply capacity and production resources.
Overall, Intersil reports that the supply chain management solution's Internet-based framework for collaborative planning and forecasting has allowed the company's management to better match market needs with production capabilities. Supply chain re-planning, the process of creating what-if scenarios, went from a labor-intensive weekly occurrence to a simplified, on-demand process.
In terms of hard numbers, the manufacturer reports that it has decreased the time required to collect data for analysis and planning from 10 hours to 20 minutes while increasing the accuracy of data collected from 94 percent to 99.5 percent.
The solution helped the company shrink its planning run time from 8.5 hours to 2.5 hours, and Intersil has also reduced its response time to incorporate dynamic changes along the supply chain from 336 hours to 24 hours.
All of which will help the manufacturer improve service and make it a more competitive member of its own customers' supply chains, Cross explained. "Oracle Advanced Planning has helped Intersil reduce the time and cost of our demand planning efforts, which ultimately makes us a better supplier to our customers," he said.
Intersil anticipates the implementation, which it says came in on budget, to produce a 246 percent return on investment over the next five years.
