Soho Corporation Case Studies
The following is a very recent example of how Soho Corporation can improve the experience and satisfaction of your customers. This example is given to show exactly what we bring to the table. The customer, a division of Circuit World Corporation, saw a complete and intensive effort from Hewlett Packard, EMC, Soho Corporation and the software vendor. Soho Corporation brings together the efforts of the team and coordinates the work. The software vendor does nothing more than would normally be done when software is sold and the customer is shown a new level of commitment and support, which directly translates into additional software sales, now--not later.
In the first week of December, Soho Corporation started and completed a complete overhaul of the CAM department in one of the divisions of Circuit World Corporation. This included replacing older Unix and NT workstations, AUI networking and optical disc storage. By working with the software vendor, Hewlett Packard and EMC Clariion we designed and implemented a new CAM system including HP C3600 workstations, HP ProCurve networking products and a Clariion secure storage system for archiving company manufacturing and design data. This hardware system was designed and tuned to support the more than $410,000.00 in new software sales that this project represented to the software company involved.
Before the project was started they were working on a 10-layer circuit board project for SGI. Several verification benchmarks were run. Using their older equipment, two of the jobs took 150 and 31 minutes respectively. After the new lab was completed, the same jobs were running in 39 minutes and 5.58 minutes. It should not take long for the improvements to not only pay for themselves but also directly improve the productivity and profitability of the company.
The applications purchased were additional seats of a package that they were already using. The performance gains came from the seamless hardware implementation and performance tuning of the complete CAM department by Soho Corporation and our hardware partners.
Here's some other examples of how Soho Corporation technical services can benefit organizations:
BTU International
BTU is a manufacturer of process ovens for the IC industry. They are an NT house and have a seat of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software. In Q4 of 2000 they upgraded to the latest version of their CFD software. Being an NT house, they had planned on buying a Compaq workstation and running a CFD application on it. The software vendor involved Matt Regan, Soho Corporation CFD / FEA specialist. Matt did the research and completed benchmarks on the current machine and the provided the data that led BTU to purchase the HP J6000 workstation that has improved their solve times by 330%. Continued support and tuning from Soho Corporation and Hewlett Packard have improved still further the performance of the application on the workstation.
Chipwrights
In the winter of 2001, Soho sales rep John Morse received a call from an EDA start-up that was having reliability issues with some Linux servers they'd purchased online. These servers were compute-intensive machines, used for development and testing with Synopsis Design Compiler applications. John was able to offer a bundle of custom Soho Corporation Linux machines that would increase their engineers' productivity and minimize downtime and administration costs for their Synopsis design applications.
Cirexx Corporation
In September of 2000 Doug Eason, Outside Sales Manger, received a call from one of our ISV partners. We were told that Cirexx Corporation was implementing a new software module and they were going to be running additional seats of Genesis software. Cirexx was a Sun and NT shop when we first contacted them. Doug made a case for trying a Hewlett Packard B2000 workstation for this new software seat. Eric Schwartz, Soho Technical Director, provided benchmarks and specifications pertaining to the Genesis application. We loaded and optimized the B2000 for Genesis and Cirexx. By having knowledge of the Sun, NT and HP-UX operating environments, we could work through the interoperability issues and give the customer a substantial performance upgrade without any additional infrastructure or staffing changes.
While Cirexx made the decision to bring in one HP-UX workstation because of the superior performance, Cirexx has committed to standardizing on the HP-UX platform in 2003 including servers, workstations and storage as long as Soho Corporation is doing the integration and providing the virtual administration.
KCE International
KCE is a PCB manufacturer with factories in North America, Singapore and Thailand. They are using the Genesis CAM software from Orbotech on legacy HP workstations, and were looking to boost application performance.
Dealing with KCE can be difficult from many standpoints. The lack of English-speaking engineers is a big problem compounded by the fact that they manage the entire business from the North American facilities and channel all hardware purchases through the application vendors.
They purchased several HP C3600 workstations, but had some problems with their file system allocation, giving them errors that prevented full operation of the application and these issues varied slightly in various plants. The lack of English-speaking engineers required that we find a creative solution. The technical staff at Soho Corporation devised and wrote procedures for all of the issues, which included a step-by-step process sent via email on how to reload the operating system and handle the conflicts related to the applications. Not only did this particular problem get resolved, but several network conflicts and error messages were also resolved in the same fashion, to the customer’s complete satisfaction and they now use Soho Corporation for all hardware support and purchases.
In 2003 we are working on a standardized RAID /
security solutions for the various facilities and their archiving needs.
ViaSystems
ViaSystems facility in Montreal, Quebec uses Genesis workstations in their CAM lab, all of which are HP UNIX workstations. This facility has standardized on this hardware platform and has added Genesis seats at the rate of 8 per year. Soho Corporation provides preloaded, configured and optimized workstations as well as support of the legacy hardware and the network which supports the engineering department.
To effectively access and archive their design data, they had been employing a massive optical jukebox, with very unsatisfactory performance results. Soho Corporation worked with the CAM manger and EMC / Clariion to implement as FibreChannel RAID array which dramatically improved the access time and reliability of their archiving solution. Using FibreChannel and RAID in this application was new territory for EMC, the application vendor and ViaSystems. Soho Corporation Technical Director, Eric Schwartz, was able to co-ordinate the proper drives, Fibre Channel host adapters and technical support--both on-site and virtual--required to make this transition.
For 2003 we are working with several other
ViaSystems plants in North America to upgrade workstations from older Sun and
legacy HP workstations to newer HP systems along with providing storage/SAN
design and implementation, network design and consulting.
PhotoCircuits
PhotoCircuits is one of the largest specialty PCB manufacturers in the world. Their facilities are located around the globe. They are also a major user of Orbotech Genesis software, exclusively on the HP-UX platform.
Being a large company, a standardized workstation platform is important to keep maintenance and administration costs down. Soho Corporation works diligently with the IT and engineering departments to see that the machines delivered to PhotoCircuits are preloaded, configured and tuned for the environment in which they will be deployed.
The usual procedure is that PhotoCircuits will bring people to the USA for training in the labs that Soho Corporation helped to design and set up and then send the new users and their workstations back to their country of origin. This makes it critically important that the workstations are ready to deploy and run the application with nothing more than a simple setup. Aside from shipping damage, Soho has a perfect record having delivered over 100 workstations to date, on time and in good working order. We have gone as far as working together to develop a nearly bulletproof shipping container for the intercontinental shipments.
For 2003 Soho Corporation working with PhotoCircuits on the transition to newer C3700 workstations as they expand their production capacity with a new factory in the Philippines as well as upgrading their current facilities.