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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff   When Alpha Industries Inc. merged with the wireless component manufacturing unit of Conexant Systems Inc. in June of 2002, many financial analysts saw dark clouds looming. Sure, the merger created the largest maker of semiconductors for cell phones, with a customer list that included Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Samsung. But the new $500 million entity -- to be called Skyworks Solutions Inc. (Woburn, MA) -- also faced major post-merger integration challenges. Alpha, with headquarters on the East Coast, and Conexant, based in California, each had its own e-commerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES). Company officials knew that, unless Skyworks was able to combine those back-end systems quickly and present a single, seamless face to the world, the new company was in danger of quickly losing customers to the competition. "It became apparent immediately that we had customers saying to us, 'You're one company now, so we should be able to place one order electronically with your company,'" says Kristofor Williams, Skyworks' electronic commerce program manager. "But, because of the post-merger challenges, we had sales people saying, 'If you want to place a sales order for a Skyworks West part, you have to send in a separate order for that. And, if it's for a Skyworks East part, you'll have to send in a separate order for that.' And that's because the manufacturing systems weren't linked up at the time." [Click to continue] |