By Sidney Hill
Manufacturing Business Technology
March, 2005

On the surface, a contract manufacturer's business model seems simple: it builds products based on specifications its customers provide. It's sort of like using a prepackaged mix to bake a cake, instead of making it from scratch.

In reality, however, the contract manufacturer's job is much more complex, particularly when it has a large number of customers. That's because each customer sends specifications in their own unique format, and the manufacturer must convert all those documents into a form that its production systems can understand before it can begin building products.

This dilemma forced Suntron, a Phoenix-based contract manufacturer, to search for a data-cleansing solution. Fortunately, says Brian Perry, director of engineering, Suntron didn't have to go very far to find the right application. All it took was a closer examination of a product life-cycle management (PLM) system already in use.

Suntron had been using the Omnify PLM package for a number of tasks, including feeding data to a business unit that excels at rapid prototypes, and verifying that any design changes a customer sends in before a product is built make it out to the shop floor in time.

"As we learned more about Omnify," Perry says, "it seemed a natural fit for our data cleansing problem."

The problem was most acute in Suntron's high-volume production area, where it builds PCBs and system assemblies for customers in the aerospace, semiconductor, and industrial equipment sectors. As a result, Perry says, "We receive bills of material [BOMs] in different formats. They can come from ERP systems, CAD or PLM programs—even PC-based spreadsheets."

Regardless of format, Suntron does two things with every BOM it receives. First, it must put the customer's part number and information about approved parts suppliers into Suntron's Oracle ERP system, which allows procurement personnel to start securing the appropriate parts. Second, information about how many components go into each product—and exactly where they should be placed—must get to the software packages that control Suntron's shop-floor machines.

Before Suntron turned to Omnify, Perry says, a 15-person document management team handled these tasks, and it normally took several weeks to get data in the proper format.

"We realized the base functionality for importing and exporting data was always in Omnify," Perry says. "So we talked with them about creating the ability to open files, read them, parse fields, and do other types of data manipulation."

Omnify responded and ultimately added a new module—called OmniBOM—to its product suite. This tool allows Suntron to transform data it receives from customers in any of 14 formats.

"That takes care of at least 80 percent of the data we receive," Perry says. "The process of transferring this data has been streamlined tremendously, going from several weeks to a matter of minutes."

That's translates to a reduction in Suntron's lead times and overall operating costs—two things its customers surely appreciate.

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