Steelwedge Semiconductor Manufacturing Solution

The semiconductor industry is a fast growing and dynamic environment driven by the downstream electronics industries. The industry is very competitive and continues to increase the density of the circuit, minimize the die size, increase the clock speed, and combine more functions into one chip. The semiconductor supply chain is specifically challenged with short product life cycles, and complex manufacturing process with long lead times that span multiple manufacturing stages performed around the globe from wafer manufacturing though assembly and final test. These complicating factors have led many semiconductor companies to look for solutions to that can help them better manage supply and demand to improve operational and financial performance.

Steelwedge has developed a Sales and Operations Planning solution to specifically address the challenges of Semiconductor manufacturers including:

• Sales Pipeline Forecasting
• Customer Specific BOMs
• Bottoms-Up Top-Down Planning

Steelwedge recognizes the challenges faced by Semiconductor companies in forecasting demand for new products and design wins that typically originates in CRM applications like Salesforce.com. In response to this, Steelwedge has developed and deployed a sales pipeline forecasting solution that provides a bridge between CRM and ERP applications and includes configurable business rules used to forecast demand based on pipeline data analysis and intelligence. As a result, Semi-conductor companies have a more comprehensive and accurate view of demand resulting in increased revenues, profit and customer service.

The need to manage customer specific part numbers in semiconductor companies adds to the complexity of forecasting demand and balancing demand and supply. Steelwedge has a proven solution designed to streamline the process for managing and forecasting demand of customer specific part numbers using a Customer Specific Bill of materials (BOM) structure. As a result, companies are able to better forecast demand at a customer level leading to improved customer service and profitability.

Finally, to enable a sales and operations planning process, Steelwedge provides the ability to support a Bottoms-up forecast generated by account execs and a Tops-down forecast managed by product management and/or operations. Steelwedge provides the flexibility to configure multiple hierarchies at multiple levels to align with a variety of product structures and organization structures typically found in semiconductor companies. Steelwedge has developed a proven track record for modeling complex semiconductor business environments to enable collaborative bottoms-up and top-down planning.

Steelwedge has successfully deployed its solution at several semiconductor companies including: Spansion, nVidia and QLogic, to name a few.

Click here for a video about how Spansion has solved their forecasting challenges.