Whether you're watching TV, chatting with a virtual assistant, staring at a tablet, or checking your fitness or medical wearable, it's likely that one unifying force behind all of that technology is a company called Cohu, which makes the equipment used by semiconductor companies to manufacture and test the underlying chips.

But until a few years ago, Cohu itself was anything but unified, having grown globally over the years in part through myriad acquisitions. When Craig Halterman joined Cohu as CIO in 2016, all of its acquired companies not only still used their own legacy back-office systems; they also still thought of themselves as separate entities.

"We duplicated everything," Halterman recalls. "We had five accounting teams, five accounts payable groups, different manufacturing supply chains for every business unit. There were no efficiencies."
And so began the quest for One Cohu: a unified company with a single identity, common cloud-based systems and processes, shared services, and the ability to scale quickly.

"Now systems aren't written for IT people. They're written for a business process," he says. "As an IT organization, we want to first provide service, then move into enabling the business, and ultimately use IT as a tool to differentiate the company."