"Serus has gone to great lengths in order to meet the needs of demanding finance organizations."
Steve Harrell, CFO and VP of Operations, Akustica
Serus Advantage for Midsize Semiconductor Companies
Delivering Intelligent Operations Management
Allows fast-growing fabless semiconductor companies to drive efficiency and reduce costs in their outsourced manufacturing operations.
Outsourcing offers great efficiencies for fabless semiconductor companies, and many semiconductor companies are taking advantage in an effort to gain an edge in a highly competitive market. But outsourcing also creates significant challenges in terms of getting an end-to-end view of the manufacturing operation.
When a fabless semiconductor maker outsources manufacturing, typically only about 50% of the data required to accurately track operations resides within the company’s own walls. The rest lies with component suppliers and contract manufacturers, severely limiting visibility into inventory levels. Additionally, those partners likely use different systems and formats to track inventory and other data, resulting in a lack of consistent data quality. Ultimately, these challenges make it difficult for the fabless semiconductor manufacturer to effectively manage its supply chain and ensure timeliness in filling orders. A lack of consistent data can also put manufacturers in danger of running afoul of regulatory compliance mandates.
The Serus Solution
Serus tackles these challenges head-on with Serus IOM Advantage, its Intelligent Operations Management solution designed specifically for fabless semiconductor companies that outsource their manufacturing operations. Advantage is now on its 6th release, and provides a closed-loop solution that:
- Improves visibility into all facets of the supply chain, enabling better business decisions
- Allows you to collaborate seamlessly with business partners, exchanging accurate information in real time
- Provides controls and facilities to reconcile data for financial and other regulatory compliance
- Acts as a single system of truth for all work-in-process and inventory data, reducing the cost of maintaining and reconciling data from disparate systems
- Standardizes data formats to improve data quality and accuracy
- Provides accurate valuation and financial reporting to reduce the time needed to close monthly and quarterly books
Serus IOM Advantage brings visibility and cohesiveness to your business, from operations to sales and finance. It integrates with your existing financial system, databases and other IT infrastructure to give you a complete picture of your operations, enabling improved decision-making. With its automated data collection, cleansing and reporting capabilities, plus its lot traceability and genealogy features, Serus IOM Advantage will give you a clearer picture of your manufacturing operation. Advantage can also integrate with any major ERP system and will help you ensure a timely close of the books each month and quarter.
Serus IOM Advantage includes two software suites to address day-to-day operations and planning.
The IOM Advantage Operations Execution Suite offers advanced customer, inventory and vendor management features. Review bookings, billing and backlog by customer and create on-time delivery reports to measure customer service levels. Execution Suite will help you maintain complete lot genealogy data, validate supplier lot information and track the value of work-in-process, helping you monitor financial exposure. The suite also helps you automate the purchase order approval process, with a role-based approval engine, and provides three-way matching to reconcile vendor invoices, receipts and purchase orders.
The IOM Advantage Advanced Planning Suite provides complete and accurate demand planning as well as supply chain planning and fulfillment. Its Web-based interface makes it simple to enter, modify, merge, aggregate and publish forecasts, while its consensus forecasting workflows make for more accurate forecasting. The Advanced Planning Suite enables you to match supply and demand with projected inventory levels, and prioritize demand based on customers, product and order types. You can even compare various fulfillment scenarios, helping you make more informed decisions, improve performance, decrease cycle times and reduce inventory costs.
The Serus IOM Advantage Suite:
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Click here for a downloadable data sheet on Serus IOM Advantage.
The Serus Ecosystem
All Serus customers reap the benefits of the Serus Ecosystem, a network of OEMs, contract manufacturers and component suppliers that are already outfitted with Serus solutions (See our Partners area for a list of Ecosystem members). Serus has standard connectors to the subcontractors that you do business with, enabling you to quickly gather data on work-in-process, inventory and more.
- Pre-built connectors to disparate subcon data sources
- Intelligent data cleansing algorithms that fix lot mismatches and data integrity issues
- Exception reports for data management with the ability to perform manual overrides
- Track lots through splits, merges, hold and release
- Detailed reports includes Lot Valuation, Costing and Yield information
- Supports advanced technologies like XML, SOAP, SOA and Web Services in addition to basic infrastructure like FTP, EDI, CSV and Excel
Becoming a part of the Serus Ecosystem means less effort, lower cost and faster time to value and volume for you.
Getting Started
Serus can help you every step of the way to get up and running with IOM Advantage. The process begins with Operations Solutions Analysis to determine the scope and objectives of your deployment, including:
- Business goal definition
- Objectives and assumptions
- Value proposition and project success criteria
Serus can help you define your solution requirements, conduct an impact analysis, assess business process change requirements and define the required hardware and IT architecture.
During Deployment
We will also be there to guide you through the deployment and integration phases, including:
- Data gathering and mapping
- Report and data configuration
- Supply chain modeling
- User training
Serus IOM Advantage Product Deployment Life Cycle
Support with IT and Managed Services
IT Services:
o Integrating to ERP (QuickBooks, Great Plains, Oracle)
o DBA services
o Application monitoring
o Disaster preparedness
Managed Services:
o Industry Best Practices
o Business process
o Master Data Modeling
o Supplier data – Content and quality
o Bi-directional Financial Integration
o Monitor ERP Data Exceptions and root cause analysis
o Supplier B2B monitoring – troubleshooting
o B2B Integration Exceptions and root cause analysis
o Supply Chain Modeling
o Serus Connect – Community/Ecosystem Knowledge Portal
o Assistance for data reconciliation for financial month end closing
Serus is also available under SaaS and Hosted Services. To learn more click on the links below:
