Visibility as a Competitive Edge

Semiconductor manufacturer uses homegrown, Oracle apps to give customers a view into data for planning, forecasting

Redwood Shores, CA  December 5, 2002  At semiconductor supplier eSilicon Corp. no two customer orders are alike. That means not only that, as a fabless custom chip company, eSilicon must aggregate a global supply chain with best-in-class suppliers to meet the specific requirements of each customer, but also that the company must have the necessary technology infrastructure in place to support its unique supply chain needs.

For eSilicon, every customer engagement is entirely unique and requires that eSilicon manage projects with vastly different intellectual property, testing times, package requirements, volumes, inventory forecasting, timelines and engineering costs.

This extremely variant data creates business flows and work flows of a scale and complexity that the company's homegrown systems alone could not handle. To cope with its rapidly expanding business, eSilicon needed to invest in applications to support its current customer base and scale to meet future growth and changing customer needs. In addition, eSilicon required a solution that could readily interface with a mature and complex global supply chain.

To meet those needs, eSilicon recently implemented Oracle's E-Business Suite, including the supply chain management and financials components. The manufacturer integrated Oracle's Supply Chain Management solution with its own eSilicon Access, a collection of homegrown applications that manage information flow and schedule logistics throughout the entire custom semiconductor manufacturing process.

At the same time, Oracle's Shop Floor Management solution unifies disparate work-in-progress data collected by eSilicon Access from manufacturing, assembly and test, and packaging facilities, as well as logistics providers. By integrating eSilicon's manufacturing information into a centralized database and enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, Shop Floor Management enables eSilicon to provide its customers with access to the data they need for planning and forecasting against production schedules.

eSilicon Access and the Oracle applications, deployed on a Sun platform, form an integrated solution that provides eSilicon's customers with the direct visibility necessary to help avoid unexpected scheduling changes from supply chain partners.

And that helps give eSilicon a competitive edge, according to Jim Ensell, vice president of business development and chief information officer at eSilicon.

"The eSilicon Access and Oracle Supply Chain Management solution is now a key differentiator for eSilicon," said Ensell. "Oracle provides eSilicon a robust, scalable e-business solution that gives complete supply chain visibility to our customers, partners and our internal operations staff. With the implementation of Oracle, eSilicon's customers know the company is prepared to grow and continue to meet their needs."

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