Tensoft collaborated on an article titled “Anatomy of a Successful Supply Chain Integration” for the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA)’s Forum. The co-authors were Tensoft fabless semiconductor customer Heather Salonga from Amalfi Semiconductor, Trisha Giacopazzi from Amkor Technology, Inc., and William White, Tensoft co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.
Each co-author provided their considerable insight into how fabless companies, ERP/supply chain vendors, and semiconductor subcontractors can best work together to integrate and automate communication between supply chain vendors and semiconductor subcontractors. In this last part of a three-part series, we’ll look at Heather Solanga’s perspective, in this excerpt from the GSA Forum’s article (Heather is now a part of the Tensoft team).
Question: What are your goals for the integration?
Answer: An accurate and up-to-date view of work in process (WIP) and activity to support planning and customer fulfillment is needed. Meeting finance department requirements for procurement management, transaction traceability and inventory tracking to manage expenses and to value inventory are also needed. Without supply chain integration, information is entered manually, which delays insight and introduces possible human error. With the supply chain integration, the information comes straight from the supplier’s system and is pre-processed by the SCM provider and is then checked by our operations team before being allowed into its system.
Question: What tips do you have for effective partnering?
Answer: The most important learning experiences revolve around the importance of communication at every step of the process. In the beginning it is important to establish basic definitions. It may appear clear what good outs, yield loss and vendor loss are, but data definitions – even for fairly common information in some cases – are not universal. Supplier billing might be based on one step in the process, while the production receipt from supply chain integration might be from another step. The number of outs from these steps might be the same most of the time, but when discrepancies occur, it is very difficult to figure out the reason why. In addition, the procedures for common exceptions like reversals, where lots are sent back to previous steps or are merged and re-worked, need to be clearly defined so that the factory, supplier headquarters, supplier billing and the fabless company are in agreement about how to handle these occurrences.
The amount of different UAT test cases was not expected at the start of our project – but we see how it is a critical part of ensuring the entire process works as needed. Beyond basic process and data definitions, it is important to establish the timing of when suppliers are to send transactions through their B2B feed. This has been an issue with many assembly and test suppliers at one time or another. Examples of timing challenges include the supplier sending invoices a few days before the supply chain integration data is sent, or sending test transaction data before the assembly data, or holding back on production data until after shipment or even sending no data at all unless requested each time.
Here are basic tasks that fabless semiconductor customers should follow:
- Initiate the request with the SCM and assembly and test provider and send out 3-way non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
- Analyze semiconductor company-specific requirements.
- Initiate kick-off meeting to go over requirements with the SCM and assembly and test provider and to give background to all parties involved. Reach agreement on timeline and deliverables.
- Monitor the SCM and assembly and test provider progress to initiate the B2B links.
- Send out sample purchase orders for UAT with test cases and ask for B2B reporting to be uploaded to file transfer protocol (FTP) site.
- Ask SCM provider to process sample information.
- Perform UAT, provide feedback and repeat with the SCM and assembly and test providers until satisfied.
- Ask SCM Provider to deploy to production.
- Continue to monitor the B2B integration in live operation.
The Tensoft SemiOps SI (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.