High-tech giant Cisco Systems has begun to deploy an innovative, secure network that will allow the company to monitor, in real time, quality testing data generated by not only Cisco’s primary contract manufacturers, but also thousands of their suppliers around the world.
Named Cesium after the silvery chemical element, the project is likely to set a new best practices standard for electronics manufacturers that are under increasing regulatory and customer-generated pressure to quickly track and fix quality problems and to document the testing of all systems and parts.
Cesium is targeted at improving collaboration between Cisco and its extended supply network. Officials said Cisco has no plans to market it as a commercial offering; nevertheless, the company clearly sees the project as an important competitive weapon.
“We see quality as a competitive advantage for Cisco,” said Roger Bhikha, Cisco’s senior director of systems and component quality and technology in a recent interview with Managing Automation. “We need to expand our focus across the value chain in ways we never did before, not just to our [electronics manufacturing service] partners, but also to our second- and third-tier suppliers.”
With Cesium, Cisco is essentially creating a secure collaboration network that will allow the company to monitor quality test results generated by its contract manufacturers and eventually thousands of suppliers.
Cesium is built around lightweight Cisco UCS servers deployed at contract manufacturer and supplier sites, and linked by a high-speed network that is secured by hardware-enabled data cryptography.
The system will give Cisco better real-time visibility into quality trends by tying directly into the testing equipment of EMS partners and suppliers. The company and its suppliers will be able to take coordinated action based on that information. With more accurate quality data from across its supply network, Cisco can respond more quickly to quality trends and events, the company said. And, in addition to collecting standard quality and testing information, Cesium will support common applications that will let Cisco and its suppliers collaborate around processes such as testing validation and fulfillment, Bhikha said.
Cesium will also support internode communications, allowing the company’s contract manufacturers and suppliers to communicate and collaborate with each other and share real-time quality information.
“Historically we had collected a lot of this information manually, relying on our partners to capture the data,” Bhikha said. “We ran into issues with accuracy and validation of data. Over time it became obvious that the process needed to be changed dramatically.”
Cisco began to roll out Cesium to its core EMS suppliers this month. The company expects all of its EMS suppliers to be on the system by the end of June. All of the company’s first-tier suppliers and OEM and original design manufacturer suppliers will be on Cesium by June 2011. Second- and third-tier suppliers will be added later, according to Bhikha. As many as 10,000 suppliers as well as contract manufacturers will be tied into Cesium, he said.