Cookson Electronics

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The Customer

Cookson Group plc is a $3.2 billion multinational company that employs more than 18,000 people in three major divisions:

		Electronics
		Ceramics
		Precious Metals

Cookson Electronics has refined processes in PCB Fabrication, PCB Assembly, and Semiconductor Packaging to become a leader in the electronics manufacturing industry. Cookson Electronics, a subsidiary of Cookson Group that employs more than 6,000 people, maintains its corporate headquarters in Foxborough, MA.

Cookson Electronics' process of producing finished circuit boards and components begins with producing raw materials, continues with manufacturing components of a circuit board, and finishes with packaging components and assembled boards. Each step requires the highest quality of work and process control.

The Challenge

Cookson implemented J.D. Edwards' enterprise planning software in multiple foreign countries. Their core team was short-staffed, and needed help in defining the business processes, which could vary significantly between each Cookson location. In Phase 1, the core team traveled to more than a dozen European sites over a two-week period, to meet with the site's leadership and design business processes for how the site would use J.D. Edwards' software. In Phase 2, the aggressive timeframe to implement the software meant that Cookson needed help to write the end-user documentation for its trainers to deliver training.

		Phase I required two Intelligo consultants to capture every identifiable process flow in many European locations.
		Phase II required two more Intelligo consultants to attend IBM's Conference Room Pilot sessions and craft work instructions based on those processes actually tested in the system.

Phase I required traveling to multiple European sites over a two-week period, capturing process flows in day-long strategy and solution workshops, crafting the final process flows during travel, and producing final deliverables by the time the implementation team reached the next city on its schedule.

Phase II required crafting end user documentation for Financial, Distribution, and Manufacturing modules in just six weeks. To accomplish this task, Intelligo documenters needed to know the processes in advance, decipher the scripts for the Conference Room Pilots, capture the step-by-step tasks, and fill in each document with screen captures following each workshop session.

The Solution

For Phase I, Intelligo consultants traveled with the core team to each site, and used Intelligo's proven Visio templates to draw customized process flows quickly and efficiently during the site meetings. These process flows would be used to help the site leadership understand how the system would work for them, and would be used in end-user training.

For Phase 2, Intelligo consultants worked for two months in Hong Kong and Singapore to write end-user documentation customized to the way the Asian sites used J.D. Edwards software. We ran the transactions described by the Conference Room Pilot scripts, captured step-by-step tasks, captured screens, and produced Microsoft Word documents that Cookson linked together on a common network drive for its trainers and users to access. We wrote our materials in clear, concise English, intended for Cookson's employees to translate into Chinese later.

Intelligo's Value-Add

Intelligo's experience in delivering custom documentation and training met the urgent need for documentation resources on the Cookson core team. For both phases, Intelligo provided experienced consultants who traveled overseas on short notice to help Cookson meet its needs for documentation and training materials. This allowed the implementation team to focus on the implementation of the software instead of the training effort. Both phases saved Cookson over $20,000 and several man-months of time over obtaining and training internal resources to do the work.

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