Editor’s Note: This post was previously published on May 24, 2018 and updated on January 20, 2022.
The following is a transcript of an old interview with Heather Salonga, former Tensoft ERP Consultant. She was in the unique position of having initially been a Tensoft customer and then working with Tensoft, helping customers to implement the SemiOps SI (Supplier Integration) application.
Question: Before you started working with Tensoft, you worked for a Tensoft fabless semiconductor customer. How did you start working with the semiconductor vendor integrations at that company, and why were you involved with this?
Answer: Before I worked at this semiconductor company, I worked at Intel with their cost and inventory system. This inventory system would get data from all their factories and subcontractors. Sometimes because of non-standard flows, time stamp difficulties or human miscategorization of products, units would seem to go missing in the system. My job was to talk to the factories and subcontractors to figure out what had happened. I became very familiar with the data and many of the processes.
When I started at this company, we were just choosing Tensoft’s SemiOps solution. I had the most experience working with this kind of data, so I just naturally started helping with the vendor integrations.
Question: In fabless semiconductor companies, what department – and who in that department – typically works with vendor integrations?
Answer: At this company, though I was technically the cost accounting manager, I did most of the work with vendor integrations. This is not typical and I don’t recommend it. Usually accountants don’t know enough about production flows to really be able to validate the data. It should be someone from Operations or IT who sees the production data all the time.
Question: Fabless semiconductor veterans are certainly aware that many of the semiconductor subcontractors provide their own WIP tracking. What are the advantages of using a service like Tensoft’s SemiOps Supplier Integration application?
Answer: Though subcontractors can provide their own tracking and can tell you what is in their system at any given time, once the data is in SemiOps SI, users can get so much more information — historical information from fabrication to final test. If someone has a quality issue related to a certain test program, a really simple report can tell you all the units that went through that program – even ones that were shipped to customers. Also, you could find out real cycle times and yields instead of what the factories might tell you.
Question: Now that you’re working with Tensoft customers to help them implement SemiOps Supplier Integration application at their fabless company, what suggestions do you have for managing vendor integrations well?
Answer: It certainly helps to move the process forward with the factories when the clients are involved to push things along. Also, when it is time for user acceptance testing, we at Tensoft don’t know the data as well as the customers do. So, for the first week or so, it is good to really look at the data to make sure it makes sense. It is good to have the people paying invoices involved as well, so they can make sure that they have a good match and the vendor can get paid.
Question: Finally, do any of the semiconductor subcontractors stand out as far as being easy to work with, from the standpoint of putting an integration in place? Is there anything that you wish they’d do a little differently to help support the process?
Answer: Fab data is always the easiest to integrate once we have access to the data, but sometimes with the bigger Fabs, it is really hard to get the approvals necessary to get the access to their data. There seems to be a lot more bureaucracy than in the Assembly and Test places. Assembly and Test houses can often take longer to integrate because each data feed seems to be a little customized. There is a lot more variation and non-standard flows. Each company sets up their quotes and pay points in a different way. Because of this, the data from the vendor and SemiOps need to accommodate these variations.
Tensoft SemiOps Supplier Integration application automates communication between your subcontractor, supply chain vendors and Tensoft SemiOps, providing real-time visibility into your production activity. For more information about this service, please contact us.