Silicon chip manufacturer National Semiconductor is about
to start the last stage of a project to consolidate 200 enterprise
systems to three core applications.
The £12m migration project will see National Semiconductor
centralise on IFS systems for manufacturing and procurement, i2 for
corporate-level planning and SAP for financials at its six
manufacturing sites in the US, Scotland, Malaysia, Singapore and
China.
National Semiconductor's chief information officer Ulrich Seif
said, "Each site used to work as an autonomous body, with some
factories having different versions of the same software.
"We had a mixture of legacy and more modern applications, but even
where the systems were modern, in-house modifications had made it
impossible to have any kind of visibility across them."
The board demanded fast return on investment on the project, he
said, and enforced the buy-in of local executives by insisting they
specified exactly how they would meet return on investment
targets.
The result has been a rapid improvement in productivity, said
Ulrich.
"Within the first six months, maintenance and labour costs have
been reduced, we have experienced savings in materials management,
and cycle time has been significantly improved," he said.
"And all implementations now have met our requirement of six-month
implementation and 18-month return on investment."
The new systems run on a variety of platforms: IFS runs on Sun
Solaris, SAP on HP-UX and i2 on IBM's AIX.