ON Semiconductor
With most of ON Semiconductor customers already using electronic communications of some sort to interact with their suppliers, there was no consistency or standardization. Different customers used different technologies and protocols such as electronic data interchange (EDI) and application-to-application interfaces.
In fact, an ON Semiconductor survey conducted found that each customer employs an average of 2.9 different connectivity options. The survey showed EDI as the most used business-to-business connectivity standard today, with 73 percent of respondents employing it. Moreover, the use of the RosettaNet protocol is particularly strong in Europe, which requires further support to gain market share in those regions.
In addition to supporting that one protocol, the company wanted to be able to offer customers a portfolio of EDI options that would support not only the technologies in use today, but also those that would come on stream in the future.
Developing numerous protocol capabilities in-house would require a very large upfront investment in hardware, software and skills. Because of this, ON Semiconductor opted to use OpenText™ B2B Managed Services instead of building out the protocol capabilities in-house.
Seamless data exchange
With B2B Managed Services, an experienced team of specialists using best-in-class methodologies has access to a state-of-the-art network and hosting infrastructure. The result is seamless data exchange and transformation between business partners of all sizes and technological sophistication.
OpenText acts as the intermediary between ON Semiconductor and its trading partners in both EDI and RosettaNet environments, running over a variety of communications infrastructures, including transmitting data over the EDI network. In addition, the platform automatically matches related transactions and monitors transaction traffic, automatically alerting ON Semiconductor in the event of any errors or exception conditions and helping customers to join the trading network.
While owning, managing and maintaining all of the hardware and software necessary to run the VAN, OpenText also monitors the infrastructure and protects it with a comprehensive high availability solution to provide near 100 percent uptime.
Once ON Semiconductor and one of its customers come to an agreement on what data they are going to exchange and how they are going to exchange it, the company uses B2B Managed Services to ensure protocols and standards set up in the EDI or RosettaNet environments are harmonious, allowing the companies to successfully interact.
After the setup is complete, the parties on both sides of the supply chain—ON Semiconductor and its customers—interact through a single hub. Each company can use a protocol and communication technology of their choosing as the VAN takes care of all of the transmission and translation necessary to exchange data and transactions between the parties. Consequently, ON Semiconductor manages only one interface, rather than having to connect individually to 500 different customers.
Because OpenText maintains sufficient excess capacity to serve its large customer base, ON Semiconductor can immediately scale up or down its traffic through the VAN as required. Furthermore, the company pays for usage rather than incurring a large up-front cost and ongoing fixed expenses to build and maintain the infrastructure and staff that would be required to facilitate peak transaction flows across a growing customer base.
OpenText provides around-the-clock monitoring and service for the VAN, ensuring that ON Semiconductor and its customers can get support whenever they need it. This support capability would have been costly to maintain in-house, as ON Semiconductor’s diverse customers operate in time zones spanning the globe and some of them run 24/7 operations.
