High Tech
High Tech
The high-tech industry is changing every day. Moore’s Law, which was first thought up in 1965, states that technology itself is roughly doubling in power every two years. Gordon Moore’s original thesis, from which this “law” was derived, posited that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit was doubling every year; this position was later revised to every two years. What this means is that technology is in a state of constant flux, with new parts and products being innovated every day. This ever-evolving lifecycle presents an important challenge.
Companies have to make sure they’re getting the right products out there in the right time frames, and their innovation practices have to be extremely versatile. This necessitates accurate data and maximum efficiency in order to create the most value in the supply chain. Lifecycle management, therefore, is a huge challenge for businesses within this vertical.
These organizations have to be intimately aware of everything that goes on within their operations, from the logistics side to the supply chain, because the industry can – and does – evolve at the drop of a hat. Companies with more mature supply chain and risk management processes can handle disruption more effectively, which is a key element inherent to the high-tech supply chain.
Industry Challenges
Within the high-tech industry, there are several key verticals:
- Software
- Semiconductor
- Electronics
- Outsourced manufacturing
- Original equipment manufacturers (OEM)
Each of these verticals handle different kinds of supply chain problems. Some challenges include risk management, shortening product lifecycles, reduced visibility and conflict minerals.
Inspirage Solutions
At Inspirage, we’ve designed custom software consulting solutions for organizations within the high-tech industry with the goal of streamlining their business processes, reducing supply chain risks and improving time to value.
Here are just a few of those solutions:
High Tech Manufacturing
- Demand Planning
- Reverse Logistics
- Service Lifecycle Management
- Supply Planning
- Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP): Inspirage has developed a cost effective, pre-configured S&OP solution that will enable companies to deploy an enterprise Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) system or to improve their current S&OP capabilities to a best-of-breed solution. S&OP requires significant change management and by reducing non-value time it enables companies to focus on evolving their S&OP processes, capabilities, and behaviors. For more information about this solution, check out our datasheet.
Consumer Electronics
- Multi-Channel Planning with Sell-In/Sell-Through & Allocation (CPFR solution): There is a tremendous amount of interest in developing sustainable Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) solutions. However, the lack of appropriate systems, leverageable data and effective business processes often leads to the undesirable continuation of disconnected data streams, and poor business decisions driven by the high latency from disparate value chain signals. Inspirage’s Multi-Channel Planning Solution is designed to break down those barriers by providing a robust platform that leverages leading business practices to enable responsive collaboration across trading partners. For more information about this solution, check out our datasheet
- Unit Forecasting
- Tracking Inventory Through Extended Supply Chain
- Inventory Planning with Risk Optimization
Conflict Minerals
In light of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, companies need to report whether their products contain minerals that come from contested areas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Inspirage provides a process that is consistent, scalable, and prevents data maintenance issues that can occur over time. The Inspirage solution helps companies deal with a dynamic environment of constantly changing players. A consistent process of evaluation is deployed that helps compare all manufacturing part numbers to the bill of material. An impact analysis is provided with a status roll-up that is visible and accurate. Non-compliant parts can be identified and resolved. Our solution can help you achieve these capabilities within the context of a broader product governance and compliance process. For more information, check out our datasheet.
Customer Success
NCR
NCR’s Chris Neff discusses how Inspirage’s deep knowledge and experience with Oracle in the CTO and manufacturing area assisted NCR with a complete solution in a short period of time. “Anybody can bring a body in, [but] you want to have somebody that comes in and really knows what they’re doing. That’s one of the things that Inspirage has been able to do is they have been able to deliver the specific resources with specific skills, background, experience, and that really helped the project.”
ON Semiconductor
Jim Hostetler, Senior Manager Product Lifecycle Management and Supply Chain Planning, ON Semiconductor discusses how Inspirage has helped the company manage their custom user interface, leading to more timely, clean data and a better user experience.
Panduit
Inspirage helped Panduit deploy 3 global OTM applications, which optimized freight spend by 50%, reduced overhead by 20%, and lowered procurement spend by 10%. Sam Hanieh discusses Panduit’s interaction with the Inspirage team: “Their team was very insightful from management through the solutions implementation team — they really understood the product and all the intricate details of it. Their team members were really committed to understanding our best practices and how to implement the solution to fit our model. They are really flexible in a sense of adjusting to the scope timeline and resources.”
Teradata
Teradata is a global leader in data analytics platforms. Inspirage and Teradata partnered to help the latter transform its service parts business using Oracle’s Planning, Logistics and Service solutions. The company needed a solution that would bring service parts planning, execution and logistics systems together and cut costs associated with parts valuations. As part of the transformation, the Oracle / Inspirage solution needed to provide the flexibility to handle 3PL warehousing and logistics and well as in-house owned logistics services. There was a critical requirement from the CFO to maintain different valuations for parts, based on condition, to provide better tracking of current inventory value. The previous solution required parts serialization to accomplish condition-based valuation. The Inspirage/Oracle solution allowed them to avoid the added costs associated with serialization to achieve the CFO goal.
For more information about our partnership with Teradata, check out our case study.
National Instruments
National Instruments offers unique software solutions for engineers and scientists that help accelerate productivity and innovation. When the Dodd-Frank Act was signed into law in 2010, National Instruments took responsibility for eliminating all of the conflict minerals in its supply chain. Inspirage was able to help National Instruments achieve this goal by implementing our conflict minerals solution that streamlines reporting and improves data quality throughout the supply chain. NI’s Environmental Program Manager Tyler Shanks offered a few lessons learned from this initiative: “First of all, like any project, one of the most important ways to ensure project success is to identify all the key stakeholders and get them on board early. Moreover, we learned that Conflict Minerals is not just a process change, and it’s important to involve someone from IT to the project team to help manage technical aspects of the project.”
To learn more about how we helped National Instruments, read our case study here.
Diodes
Diodes is a manufacturer of semiconductors, and it has a global supply chain that spans manufacturing sites in China, Germany and the U.K. Due to elongated lead times on the input side and short cycle time on the fulfillment side, the company needed an accurate way to forecast and manage demand. Inspirage was able to implement and maximize the benefits of Oracle Demantra applications.
For more information, check out our video.
Contact Us
To learn more about our high tech solutions and our customer success stories, contact the software consulting experts at Inspirage today.