Profit Magazine - February 2008

operations, WiQuest. But WiQuest’s investment in Oracle is strategic and a competitive differentiator that allows it to continue its aggressive growth and get to its target goal faster— without facing numerous transitions from a legacy system.

WiQuest needs to compete with the big guys at every step. The company keeps its design, engineering, and sales force in-house. The rest of the business, from manufacturing to packaging and distribution, is contracted out. This allows the company greater flexibility and an increased level of capabilities, but it also means that supply chain management is critical to success. “For us to piece all these things together in [Microsoft] Excel is a nightmare,” Chandran says. “Our entire business takes place on Oracle.”

In fact, WiQuest’s management did start out using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets but realized very quickly that they wouldn’t be able to keep up with rapid growth. Chandran, mindful of the financial requirements of a startup, evaluated various freeware applications and found none that were powerful enough to support the company’s growth—nor could he find any that worked with partner and customer systems. “For semiconductors, if you have a multifactory flow with sales and customers in different continents, you need to have an integrated enterprise system in place,” Chandran says. WiQuest’s management team started looking at small-business solutions but realized that as they competed against and sold to larger companies on their way to becoming large themselves, they needed to think bigger.

Founded in 2003, WiQuest was using Oracle by 2007. The implementation was handled by DAZ Systems, which leveraged the Oracle Business Accelerator tools to get WiQuest up and running quickly. “Customers often don’t need a custom solution, but they do need one that works with their business and with any partners that they connect to,” says Keith Olcha, sales director for DAZ, in Dallas, Texas. “Many businesses not only do fine with a standard approach, but they benefit because of the shorter implementation time and the easier connection to manufacturers and distributors.”

One advantage of starting early in the company’s lifecycle and leveraging the right set of implementation tools was that the complete implementation went quickly—only two months—because there wasn’t much data to find and convert, and the company benefited from standardized business processes. “We stayed away from customization,” Chandran says. To the extent that any custom elements have been included in the system, it’s been on the design end, where some computer-aided design tools are outside the Oracle system now, although

they will be integrated soon so that Oracle becomes the company’s master system.

Managing the supply chain with Oracle software has
three key benefits. WiQuest outsources the manufacturing
of its wafers to fabricators in Asia that are used to dealing
with major multinational corporations, including some of

WiQuest’s competitors. From a supply chain perspective, the
Oracle interface helps put WiQuest on an even footing with
those competitors and ensures that its projects have the same
priority. Then, it ensures that WiQuest’s customers, including
three of the top four notebook PC
original equipment manufactur-
ers and the top two PC peripheral
companies, will have their needs
met. “Our customers like that we
have a good system in place and
can play in the same field as the big
guys,” Chandran explains. Finally,
the Oracle system helps WiQuest
manage its expensive inventory.
Effective inventory management
leads to hard dollar savings that fund
more research and development,
making it possible for the company
to continue to push the wireless

future. “It’s critical for us to have such a system so that we can keep up with our rapid growth,” says Chandran.

“Many businesses not only do fine with a standard approach, but they benefit because of the shorter implementation time and the easier connection to manufacturers and distributors.”

—Keith Olcha, Sales Director, DAZ

GOING FROM ZERO TO 60—AND BEYOND

Good IT can help midsize businesses maintain their culture, because it can allow them to have a bigger market reach without adding new employees and the attendant bureaucracy. These companies can focus on creative innovation while the IT system gets the information from place to place, without more meetings, more memos, or more managers.

One key to success, says CSS International’s Franklin, is that companies know their business case before making the investment. Another is ensuring that all executives are on board with the decision. That’s particularly important in a midsize company, where there are fewer executives in total, so they all need to buy in. “Software in and of itself has virtually no value,” he says. “It’s all in how you use it.” <>