Addressing Supply Chain Challenges with Real-time Productivity Management: Role of Streaming Data in Smart Manufacturing Infrastructure

With semiconductor factories worldwide running a full capacity in most market segments and facing new supply chain challenges every day, it is no wonder that productivity is now an important care about across the industry. Factory managers carefully monitor their Key Performance Indices (KPIs) for any indications of lost productivity so they can react quickly to identify and address the root causes of these excursions.

It is no longer sufficient to know precisely how well you did last week or even yesterday. Rather, it is important to have a fairly good idea of how well your factory is running right now. This means optimizing the tradeoffs between quality, throughput, capital effectiveness, delivery performance, and perhaps other metrics on a continuous basis.

In such highly constrained situations, the value of the “right” answer decreases rapidly over time, which is the principal criterion for using streaming data in the manufacturing applications that most affect these KPIs. Since the data sources that most accurately represent the true status of manufacturing operations at any instant are the units of manufacturing equipment in the factory, it follows that an equipment integration platform capable of high-volume streaming data collection is a vital component in the factory system infrastructure.

This presentation describes such an environment and highlights not only the sources and methods for streaming equipment data, but also some of the key applications and their stakeholders that leverage this capability. It also identifies the industry standards that are already in place for calculating a wide range of productivity metrics that can impact supply chain performance.