Semiconductor Manufacturer Uses Kofax RPA to Perform the Work No One Actually Wants to Do

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The Challenge

In recent years, this semiconductor manufacturer has focused on diversifying its customer portfolio—traditionally centered on large enterprises—by reaching out to small- and mid-sized companies in regional markets. For many of these smaller customers, efficiency is paramount. To win their business, the manufacturer must offer solutions that deliver the best value for the money, and are quick and easy to implement.

A company spokesperson said: “Most of the products we manufacture are designed to be integrated into larger electronic devices, and are typically assembled on printed circuit boards [PCBs]. We provide detailed design objects for all our products, predominantly downloadable digital twins in various design formats to help customers utilize these directly for integration in their applications and solutions.

“These PCB components (digital twins) are a vital resource for smaller customers in particular, who may lack in-house knowledge of the intricacies of circuit design and who want to evaluate the product behavior within their own design environment.”

The manufacturer makes its product portfolio and related documentation, including design models, freely available on the company website. However, with a portfolio spanning thousands of products, ensuring that related documentation was readily available and easily manageable—not to mention up-to-date—was no easy task.

The spokesperson continued: “We are constantly releasing new products and adapting existing designs, and it is essential that we keep related product content up-to-date as well. In the past, our employees had to manually search our website to validate and enrich existing product information. Given that we manage a portfolio of more than 6,000 products, you can imagine how time-consuming this was!

“Relying on manual methods meant that it simply wasn’t possible for us to guarantee that our online product content was complete and accurate. And if customers can’t find the information they are looking for, they may turn to one of our competitors instead—a risk we couldn’t afford to take as we expanded into new markets.”

The Solution

Seeking a way to close the content gap, the manufacturer turned to Kofax Kapow—a powerful information integration and robotic process automation solution that interacts with web sites, portals and other applications to acquire, enhance and deliver information into databases and enterprise systems.

“Kofax Kapow was strongly recommended by one of our employees,” said the spokesperson. “We evaluated other solutions, but there really was no contest. Only Kapow offered the capabilities we were looking for right out of the box. We worked with Kofax to ensure that the solution was implemented in the best possible manner. It was a positive experience and we are very happy with the results of our collaboration.”

Using Kofax Kapow, the manufacturer built integration process flows (commonly referred to as software robots) that interact with the company website, automatically extracting product guides and related content. By analyzing the extracted content results, teams can understand what content is available and where information may be missing or inaccurate.

“Kofax Kapow allows us to see what others can’t,” stated the spokesperson. “It is much easier for us to keep pace as new products are introduced and others become obsolete. And whereas in the past, individual product managers were responsible for reviewing and publishing content, today it is all performed by the central services team. This has brought newfound control and consistency to content publication and management, and people now have greater trust that the information on our website is accurate.”

The manufacturer is also looking at ways to harness Kapow to automate the content publication process. The spokesperson noted: “At the moment, we rely on other tools to publish product information to our website, but we are interested in automating this process with Kofax Kapow. It has the potential to deliver even greater efficiencies around content management.”

The Results

Today, the manufacturer is driving a highly efficient and centralized approach to managing online content—helping it deliver better service in the First Mile™ of customer interaction, all while empowering internal teams to work more productively.

“We have significantly reduced the time and effort that our people spend managing and updating product documentation on our website,” remarked the spokesperson. “Kofax Kapow does all the hard work for us! We’d need about 10 to 15 people to do the job that Kapow performs and, to be honest, it’s a job that no one actually wants to do.

“Even more importantly, we can ensure that the product information available to customers on our website is complete, easy to find and as up-to-date as possible. We’re giving customers much more straightforward access to the content they need, which helps them work more effectively when designing and building solutions based on our products. Now that we can be certain that customers are working from the latest product guidance, it increases the likelihood that they are applying our components in the way they are intended, helping make sure that end products work safely and correctly.”

New possibilities
Building on its initial success in automating data extraction from its own website, the manufacturer has since launched an initiative to streamline content syndication to its distribution partners’ sites.

“Distributors play an important role in our sales efforts, offering us a much wider market for promoting our technology,” said the spokesperson. “We work with around 15 distribution companies, and they all maintain web catalogues containing our products and related documentation. It is in our best interest to make sure they have the most comprehensive and current information on all of our products, because it helps us maximize sales.”

Using Kapow, the manufacturer can automatically navigate distributor websites with precision, finding and extracting content related to its products, and use the newfound insight to spot where information gaps might be present.

The spokesperson concluded: “Kofax Kapow makes it so much easier to ensure that our distributors are working with the most complete and up-to-date product content. We scan their websites weekly, and if they are missing any content, we can quickly provide them with the information they need to fill the gaps. The more information distributors have on our products, the more likely they are to sell our products. It’s a win-win situation, and another great example of how Kofax Kapow is helping us to take the business to new heights of success.”

In the future, the manufacturer plans to take advantage of Kofax Kapow as a strategic enabler for various automation and smart data initiatives. The company is evaluating a number of potential projects, including using Kapow to automate complex time-tracking activities that are currently performed in spreadsheets, to enable real-time business intelligence on proprietary research data, and to automate website status monitoring.