GaN Systems, a fabless semiconductor company based in Ottawa, Canada needed a scalable solution to meet their industry-specific needs and help support their global semiconductor supply chain. After a thorough search, they chose the Tensoft Fabless Semiconductor Management solution. We recently interviewed the team at GaN Systems to learn about their experience with Tensoft FSM (predecessor to Tensoft SemiOps) solution, including the implementation process and the benefits achieved.
Watch the case study video below, or you can read the transcript below that, if you prefer.
Video Transcript:
Stephen Coates, VP Operations:
GaN Systems is a fabless semiconductor company making new technology gallium nitride power transistors, the world’s most efficient power transistor today. We run our wafers, our assembly and test through very large partner companies. We ship to multiple distributors and many, many end customers around the world. And, really, Tensoft is the very important aspect for us to being able to manage all aspects of those parts of our business.
Mike Lamb, IT/Implementation:
So, we looked at other ERP systems, but we realized that to bring those in would take a lot of customization. Software is not our business. Developing chips is the business. So, we’re looking for a partner that not only brought in the solution set but the processes and be able to help us support a fabless semiconductor supply chain that’s global with our partners. That’s really why we focused on the Tensoft solution.
James Rourke, Controller-Accounting:
We took three months to implement FSM and we really needed to get an understanding of our IBOMs and made sure we fully understood how the program works, and how it ties to GP in order to make sure that before we went live, there was no issues with our IBOM’s. The Tensoft team really helped and supported us during that phase.
FSM really helps with the product costing and tracking of yields and standard cost to actual. So, we can generate reports on what our actual costs were to our standard cost. And we can figure out why they’re lower or higher than we expected. So now we’ve got a lot more visibility into our supply chain. We can see where our products are in WIP, and finished goods.
Stephen Coates, VP Operations:
We’re able to much more efficiently, and much more quickly now, process our purchase orders. On the sales orders side – back log, booking and billing, we have much clearer visibility on. And just generally I think our ability to execute from a procedural standpoint is now very clearly defined and runs very much more efficiently.
I think on the finance side we’ve seen really some great improvements on things like how we close out at end of month, how we do our consolidation.
Chia Lian, Operations Co-Ordinator:
Tensoft’s been able to grow with us as we’ve needed them throughout the course of – I believe – two years now. We’ve implemented planning just to be a bit more rapid on delivery, and we see business intelligence being a really big part in the future. We’re making progress towards that as well.
Mike Lamb, IT/Implementation:
The days are gone by where you call the IT shop for the reports. So, it’s pushing the environment and the self-service BI capabilities out to the end users. And that’s where the Power BI piece came in and then we’re just using the Tensoft data.
Stephen Coates, VP Operations:
I think from a strategic level, for me running the operations side of the business, what’s really important is to put in place an infrastructure that we’ll really be able to scale as our business scales. Over the next two to three years we see a very strong ramp, and we feel we now have a very firm foundation with the Tensoft implementation that we have today to be able to deliver against that ramp and grow our business.
I think we made a great selection choosing Tensoft as our partner. And I think that together we’ve been able to put in place what will, I think, be a very, very strong system, for GaN Systems in years to come.