Intel's Level One Communications

The Client

Level One Communications, Inc. is an Intel company, located in Sacramento, California. The organization creates products that are the key building blocks for Intranets and Internets. Level One is a leading semiconductor supplier providing silicon connectivity, LAN switching and WAN access solutions for high-speed telecom and network applications. These components are critical elements in today's telecommunications and data communications networks. Level One combines its strengths in analog and digital circuit design and communications systems expertise to produce digital and mixed-signal solutions with increased functionality and greater reliability. The resulting products lower total systems cost. Level One is ISO 9001 registered, illustrating the company's commitment to world class standards and providing high quality products.

The Business Challenge

The primary business challenge at Level One was to re-engineer a paper-based system of Engineering Change Notice (ECN) communication, making the data available on Internet and Intranet environments. The overall goal of this process change was to improve the security and accuracy of the ECN data. McFadyen Solutions employed a web content management system to meet this challenge.

The Return on Investment

Level One experienced immediate return on investment through new business process efficiencies. By migrating information to a digital environment: the risk of document loss was decreased, the risk of causing delays and generating product waste by using a wrong or inaccurate document was diminished. Production cycle times with sub-contractors and internal personnel was drastically decreased and labor resources now spend time adding value instead of chasing paper. Web content management is providing Level One the freedom to ensure data accuracy and control data access--getting the right information to the right person. Due to the overwhelming success of this implementation, Level One plans to bring many more of their processes online.

The Technology

Goals of the web content management solution included streamlining document processing, improving document quality and usability, defining document format standards, making documents accessible, legible and accurate, providing accountability, and defining user access security. To meet these goals and create a process that drastically improved the status quo, a system was designed based on the proper architecture, interface, and software customizations. A 3-tier architecture was chosen for it's scalability, access security features, and its ability to divide loads between the client server, application server, and database server. The interface is HTML-based and follows the standards of web search engines that most users are familiar with. The interface is ideal because requirements are very limited, only a web browser is necessary. There is no deployment effort involved and no client installation is necessary. Document security is maintained via a login which is necessary for any client activity. Software customizations were implemented to create electronic forms and applications for a variety of tasks within the new digital system. Customized forms and applications include: document registration, a document search mechanism on the SCS and Engineering Change Notices.