Analog Devices Shortens Product Publishing Cycle from Months to Hours

Executive Summary

In 1998, Analog Devices, Inc., a leading manufacturer of high performance analog, mixed signal and digital signal processing integrated circuits, had a broad and complex product line that needed to be housed on the Web to provide a solid foundation for a future e-commerce program. The company partnered with Molecular to design a secure, scalable product database resulting in more efficient management of increasingly growing product sets, shortened information publishing cycles and decreased printing and shipping costs.

Results:

• Saved thousands of dollars associated with printing and shipping catalogs, sales bulletins and new product announcements.
• Shortened the information publishing cycle from months to 24 hours.
• Established efficient management of increasingly growing product sets.
• Provided a compelling user experience both internally and externally.

The Challenge: Building a Solid Foundation

Analog Devices, Inc., founded in 1965 in Norwood, Mass., originally produced amplifiers for strengthening electrical signals. The company began to shift to semiconductor manufacturing in 1969. In 1998, Analog Devices had sales of $1.23 billion with 40% of its revenues coming from the communications market, including products for wireless applications and high-speed access to the Internet.

Prior to the Internet, Analog Devices never required a central data repository to house the information for its over 8,000 products. Different departments stored their information, including product descriptions, categories, and pricing, on their own systems. Product managers would have been unable to publish information directly to internal and external Web sites through a single, common interface. The company needed a way to harness all of this data into one central product repository so that it could be projected online and easily managed.

The Approach: Ensuring Seamless Integration

Analog Devices, Inc. and Molecular engaged in a strategic partnership to meet the following goals:

• Build a solid, Web-based product database that would integrate several databases into a common repository for all of Analog's 8,000+ products.
• Provide a solution that would scale to add future business units and complement current business processes.
• Develop the application to allow managers to easily publish product information accurately, quickly and securely.
• Integrate new application seamlessly with legacy system.

Molecular designed a Web-based product database by customizing Molecular Product Manager™, an infrastructure that creates a central datastore from the various datafeeds and legacy systems. The database was then integrated with Analog Devices' SAPTM ERP system. Via the Web server and Internet browser, the Analog product managers were able to update all of the information associated with their products including descriptions, categorization, datasheets and other related information. On a nightly basis, approved products were replicated out from the intranet database to a database on the public Internet for use by applications on www.analog.com. A complete security model was applied so the product managers are only able to update the product information they are responsible for.

Molecular employed Microsoft SQL Server, Internet Information Server, Active Server Pages and Molecular Product ManagerTM software. These technologies were integrated into the previous Unix-based Web site to achieve a seamless combination of capability and performance.

The Benefits: Efficient Information Management

The project took six months to complete and launched in the winter of 1998. The new product database impacted Analog's business goals and allowed them to reap many benefits:

• Product managers were able to efficiently manage large, fast-changing product sets, minimizing mistakes.
• Over 400,000 technical documents were downloaded per month, saving costs associated with printing and shipping product catalogs, sales bulletins and new product announcements.
• The information publishing cycle was shortened from months to 24 hours.
• The initiative provided a compelling user experience both internally and externally.