Manufacturing data warehouses---Philips Semiconductor

The November issue of Managing Automation has a big article on manufacturing data warehouses. It includes a description of the Philips Semiconductor data warehouse in California. Philips management can now look at profitability by product line, customer, part number, by customer and part number, or by package type. This is useful for going back and looking at low-margin products that can be eliminated. Another thing is that it allows them to see which customers are most profitable and why. They would then move very profitable customers to a very strategic customer list. Prior to their data warehouse, they would have had to have gone to three different databases for the sales and at least to to three databases for the cost of those sales, all in multiple locations around the world. Ranking them by part number, geographical location and other factors to determine profitability would have been an enormous undertaking. They have 7,000 products. They can now do in minutes or seconds what would have taken weeks before. Mike Willett http://www.storage.com/ Storage Computer Corp. Tel. 603-880-3005