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Semiconductor Manufacturer Relies on Acorn to Understand Profitability of Value Added Services

Fairchild Semiconductor is a $2 billion semiconductor manufacturing company. Herb Rau, strategic marketing manager, says that he was very impressed with Acorn's innovative, effective profit management solution because of its easy and efficient way to determine customer service expenses.

Founded in 1997, Fairchild is headquartered in Portland, Maine with manufacturing and design facilities in the United States, Europe and Asia. The company has 10,000 employees and serves as the global leader in supplying high performance products to multiple-end markets.

Effective customer relationship management is key to a company's success. Fairchild wanted detailed measurement of value-added options such as freight, EDI, CFAP, consignment warehousing, third party warehousing and special packaging and labeling. With an emerging change in the electronic supply chain, Fairchild needed a deeper understanding of its service-related activities.

"Acorn was the most responsive of all the companies that we interviewed," says Rau. "The consultants consistently demonstrated extreme dedication to their work, and they helped us realize the value their software could provide our company."

Fairchild engaged with Acorn in the spring of 2000 and integrated them into a cross-divisional team to analyze the numbers. The project focused on service-related activities such as logistics, marketing, R&D, sales and Q&A, as well as support for services such as EDI and CFAP.

Acorn's team immediately went to Fairchild and interviewed people of all levels and departments to get a clear understanding of the company, its products, processes and philosophy. With this knowledge, the team began to create the numerous complex algorithms that are embedded within the Acorn model. Within a few months, Fairchild saw the impact of Acorn's analysis.

"We had all of this data in our systems," explains Rau. "Acorn pulled the data out to help us understand what it meant."

Acorn's model was able to capture and consolidate the information in an easy to understand format that delivers the details needed for effective decision-making. "The differentiating factor in Acorn's solution is that their software interprets the information in a timely and efficient manner, and the consultants stay with you through the project. We are very pleased with our engagement with Acorn."

Fairchild competes with the biggest players in the semiconductor market. They believe that Acorn's data gives them a competitive advantage because it allows them to establish closer and deeper customer relationship management.

Because of Acorn's efficient and timely capture of data, real-time management decisions can now be made to improve the organization's performance. As with all high-tech companies, Fairchild uses internal metrics to justify the purchase of their systems. Acorn Systems met the internal ROI requirements of these measurements.