Intelligent Manufacturing € September € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 9

AMCC Adopts Online Database System

When Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) (San Diego, Calif.), a manufacturer of high performance integrated circuit products, expanded its operations from developing custom circuits to a variety of standard, off-the-shelf circuit products, increased demands came to bear on the company's internal operations. To accommodate this change, AMCC decided to standardize on database technology that enabled it to streamline operations and lower costs significantly by integrating its order entry, design, manufacturing, distribution, financial-control, and decision-support systems.

The new Informix-based information system utilizes SAP's R/3 application software and Consilium's WorkStream Open manufacturing control software to shorten order-fulfillment cycles, lower costs, and better serve AMCC customers.

The integrated circuit market is characterized by moderate competition, lengthy custom design processes, high-precision manufacturing, and year-long order-fulfillment cycles. AMCC's goal was to augment its production capabilities by outsourcing some wafer production, and restructure internal operations to provide quicker turnaround and lower cost products.

"We anticipated the increasing time to market and cost demands of the standard products market and realized that our host-based system would need to be replaced, and that the proprietary application software packages that ran our business weren't sophisticated enough to meet our changing needs," said Kevin Lammers, AMCC's director of MIS. "To sell our new, standard products competitively, we need to be able to commit an order over the phone and ship it the next day if that's what our customer wants. Our existing system wasn't capable of providing that kind of production turnaround or customer service."

After a great deal of investigation, AMCC decided to switch to a standards-based client/server architecture based on the UNIX operating system to gain the reliability, flexibility, speed, integration, and price/performance needed to meet its new business requirements. The system needed to support distributed processing, so end users could access information from multiple databases using their PCs or X-Terminals.

AMCC also wanted to leverage the large variety of administration tools and existing third-party applications available within the UNIX environment to profitably deliver the kind of customer service and cost-effective products its customers require.

AMCC's new, 50-plus gigabyte system is based on Informix database software as the foundation. The company has also implemented Consilium's WorkStream Open shop floor control software and SAP's R/3 application suite for order entry, purchasing, financials, forecasting, materials management, shipping and receiving.

The system's distributed data processing capabilities enable users to transparently exchange data between applications. "This close integration between applications improves end-user access to critical data, which in turn improves our manufacturing cycle times," Lammers said. "As our applications continue to expand, we are looking forward to some of the new features this system offers, such as the ability to handle on-line backup to multiple tapes simultaneously and enhanced system administration tools."

Now, when an order comes in, an AMCC order-entry clerk logs the order into the system, including customer number, order type, and whether it's an application-specific integrated circuit or a standard product order. The SAP software then automatically checks this information with the WorkStream Open software -- which tracks all parts and orders as they progress through the factory -- for available stock on hand and immediately schedules a delivery date while the customer is on the phone. If a particular item isn't in stock, the system checks to see what parts are in production or on order. If a customer calls back to change the order, the system simply reschedules accordingly. This on-line commit capability shortens AMCC's order-fulfillment cycle for standard products from more than a week to one day, enabling it to compete in such a high-volume, low-margin market.

End-user access to on-line information makes it feasible to deliver order and shipment information instantly, which has become the baseline for competitiveness in the commercial semiconductor market. The system is also much easier to use, reducing a multi-step, one-week order process to a few keystrokes completed in moments.

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