Verigy Ltd. isn’t like many companies, where collaborating online and digital manufacturing are just goals to achieve someday. This Singapore-based builder of testing systems for the semiconductor industry is already sharing massive amounts of data on the fly, worldwide, among not only its more than 1,500 employees, but also among hundreds of other people in its supplier network.

Manufacturers such as Verigy attribute their success at marshalling hundreds to thousands of people to their product lifecycle management (PLM) programs. They use these programs to manage each product line from its conception and production through its service in the field and eventual disposal. At the heart of these programs is software that exploits the power of the Internet and the continual advancements in networking technology over the last decade.

With PLM software, companies can manage their product development and delivery activities from central locations. All parties collaborating on a project around the world work from the most up-to-date information, reducing the waiting and rework that often occurs in bringing new products to market. The result is much shorter lead times and smaller initial investments. Central management also makes it easier for manufacturers to establish tighter, more intimate relationships with their vendors.

In fact, Verigy owes its very existence to this latter ability. The intimate collaboration with suppliers established through the MatrixOne PLM software from Paris-based Dassault Systemes’ Enovia family of PLM solutions made it possible for Verigy to spin-off a year ago from Agilent Technologies, of
Santa Clara , Calif. It was able to make the separation and bring its products to market with an extremely lean engineering and information technology staff.

At start-up, Verigy needed quite a bit of technical savvy to design its advanced technology and manage the design information. It also needed a sophisticated infrastructure capable of producing the hundreds of printed circuit boards, as well as fabricating the complex mechanical structures that house the electronics and manipulate the products being tested. The infrastructure also had to support the assembly and shipment of the final products. Instead of developing all of that in-house, it sought this expertise and capacity from different contract manufacturers around the world.

The PLM system became the glue for holding together this global network of people and uniting the various silos of product content throughout the company and its supply chain. The Verigy staff was able to clone and simplify Agilent’s MatrixOne implementation in about five or six months. “The most time-consuming part was installing the infrastructure, that is, the servers and rest of the network,” says John Cowles, Verigy’s manager of IT—R&D and Quality Solutions.

“We use MatrixOne as the bridge for capturing the new product design information as well as product change information,” Cowles adds. “And downstream participants in the product-generation process can participate in those review processes and access the information once it has been approved.”

One source of truth

For Cowles, the biggest advantage of the PLM software is its ability to roll eight to 10 product data management (PDM) instances into one PLM instance. The PLM software synchronizes the disparate databases automatically, making them appear as though they were one. “It gives us single source of truth,” Cowles says. “We can take advantage of new replication technologies that might improve performance and get out of the quagmire of replicated data.”

Although the MatrixOne software serves as the central clearinghouse of information, it doesn’t try to do it all. Verigy and its suppliers can use whatever other
enterprise-wide software makes sense for their operations. “The idea of using one system to control everything is unrealistic,” says Jon Gable, MatrixOne’s vice president of product management. “There will always be some niche that something is not the most effective tool for.”

The software developer kept this truth in mind when it designed its federated strategy, a strategy that distributes files to where end-users are working and manages the access to them through central servers. The company’s “adaplet” technology integrates the data in other enterprise systems by representing it as if it were stored natively within MatrixOne. So the information being exchanged might actually originate in other enterprise level systems without the user ever being aware of it.

“The MatrixOne data model has a flexible metaschema that lets us adapt it to how we want the solution to work and how upcoming application integrations need to work,” says Cowles, at Verigy. “You can have a very simple operation with one machine running your database and server tier. Or if you prefer, you can ...