The RosettaNet: How Far Away?
Nicole Lewis, Contributing Editor -- Semiconductor International, 8/1/2001
While the economic downturn continues to play havoc with the semiconductor industry's ability to burn off its inventory excess, the current slowdown has opened up a marvelous opportunity for companies to improve their supply chain mechanisms in preparation for an economic upswing.The recent announcement by RosettaNet that 10 members of its Semiconductor Manufacturing Board have achieved the first milestone - to implement Partner Interface Processes (PIPs) related to work in process with at least one partner by Q3 2001 - shows that the industry is taking data sharing in the supply chain seriously. Sharing exclusive, sensitive information on manufacturing processes with several partners is something the industry has to become accustomed to.
But many in the industry, including National Semiconductor Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and TSMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan), explain that the implementation of RosettaNet PIPs have helped their companies improve supply chain visibility and automation that allows them to augment planning processes and enhance responsiveness to change.
Yet while advocates of RosettaNet - a consortium of high-technology companies charged with streamlining e-business processes - sing the organization's praises, there are challenges that may very well frustrate RosettaNet's progress.
Among them is the ever-present problem of convincing the semiconductor industry to move away from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) processes and toward extensible markup language (XML), a language upon which RosettaNet PIPs are based. The other difficulty is to overcome the expense of implementing RosettaNet PIPs. The cost of implementing a new dictionary of codes - along with changing database processes and the resources that are required - has been estimated to be as high as $200,000 to $500,000 per PIP. In an environment where cutbacks are the norm, some companies may opt to postpone a project of this nature.
Nevertheless, RosettaNet is still plugging away. Not only has the organization been able to continue work with its eFAB Alliance, but the organization's semiconductor board has grown to 30 member companies over a six-month period.
That said, the semiconductor industry is hoping that RosettaNet will be the catalyst for meaningful change in its supply chain management infrastructure. In these difficult economic times, the question is, how far are semiconductor companies willing to go to make this happen.
