Datasweep Inc. and KPMG Consulting Inc. recently announced a partnership to deliver Web-based supply chain solutions to high-technology manufacturing companies. The agreement calls for the two companies to combine Datasweep’s real-time collaborative manufacturing solutions with KPMG’s integration services, allowing manufacturers to work interactively across the breadth of their extended supply chain.
Leading high-technology equipment manufacturers are working hard to improve time-to-market for new products, manage the lifecycle of individual units, and achieve this while outsourcing some or all of manufacturing to multiple contract partners, said Robert Schoenthaler, vice-president for KPMG’s high-technology line of business in McLean, Va. Datasweep’s real-time collaborative manufacturing solutions are able to address these issues, thereby helping OEMs increase their return on investment from ERP (enterprise resource planning) and supply chain planning systems, he said.
Julio Rojas, director of strategic alliances at Datasweep in San Jose, Calif., said the partnership is designed to tap granular information that ERP systems cannot mine today. For example, Datasweep technology can help a manufacturer interact electronically with suppliers to track a part that may be causing a failure in a product before it is shipped, he said.
In addition, manufacturers can exploit the back-end reporting capability of the product to analyze production data and share it with their suppliers to improve the process, Rojas said.
KLA-Tencor, a San Jose, Calif.-based manufacturer of process control solutions for the semiconductor industry, is working with KPMG to roll out Datasweep’s collaboration product globally within the next six months. In the next 18 months, KLA-Tencor plans to bring 50 key suppliers directly into its Datasweep system.
The product is available in Canada but there currently aren’t any specific targeted markets or numbers for the Canadian market, said Ann Lathan, spokesperson for Datasweep.
“We’re really selling to the North American market… we don’t really see a border
right now,” Lathan said. “We’re selling our product to companies that fit our target
areas. We are certainly selling to Canada and to subsidiaries of Canadian companies.
Certainly there are Canadian companies that are building telecom equipment and
are contract manufacturers that we would be selling to.
“We are marketing to high tech and industrial manufacturers — our target markets are telecommunications, equipment and device manufacturers, medical equipment and device manufacturers, complex industrial equipment, general high tech electronics and contract manufacturers. Anybody who is building, putting parts together to make equipment, whether they be components to telecom equipment, medical equipment, or big systems. So certainly there are manufacturers in Canada that we will actively selling to, but we haven’t really divided Canada up (that way),” she said.
