"That is an area that we understand and know well. In addition, Singapore's commitment to the semiconductor industry has been stated, with land reserved for this," said Robert Gay, director of the Graduate Programs Division at Gintic.  

"Over 20 semiconductor facilities are expected to be in Singapore by the beginning of the next century," he said. 

This partnership is part of an Informix initiative to provide data warehouse applications to various industry sectors, by working with both hardware and software vendors, like Sun, Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment, and Business Objects.  

Five consultants from Informix, and six from Gintic have worked together for the past three months on a "virtual factory" to demonstrate the features of a data warehouse in a manufacturing environment. 

According to Gay, a manufacturing environment typically has a minimum of 20 to 30 data sources, on different distributed platforms. As the data is not consistent, a data warehouse would help to clean the data, and collate information on the status of the equipment, and for job scheduling. 

"Our goal is to integrate the manufacturing execution systems and databases, to have a single logic that ties everything together. Right now, the equipment monitoring and job scheduling can be handled by different systems, which is very tedious," said Gay. 

The cost of a prototype data warehouse application by Gintic and Informix, would range from S$40,000 (US$24,970) to S$400,000, depending on the scope of the project, he said. 

"The primary issue that determines the scope of the prototype, is the fundamental business problem," said Angus McDougall, country manager of Informix Singapore. "This is a low-risk, try-before-you-buy alternative."