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Battery manufacturers can improve decision-making with Unified Process Control

Gain a holistic view of equipment and process health for increased performance and quality

by Agnes Sowa and Christopher Reeves

Battery manufacturers can improve decision-making with Unified Process Control
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What’s Inside

Working in manufacturing technology, it’s easy to get caught up in learning about, choosing and implementing tools such as big data, digital twin, artificial intelligence or machine learning. Buzzwords like Industry 4.0 feel like goals to achieve. In reality, the goal is (and has always been) to enhance factory performance by addressing top contributing issues. As battery factories ramp up volume, yield-related issues are likely to hit the top of the Pareto chart.  Various KPIs help drive improved yield. These include how much time it takes to detect a problem and how a decision will impact production quality (Figure 1), as well as the cost of these events. The ease of improving these metrics, as well as how far to expand them, is directly linked to the way systems are implemented at a foundational level.
Figure 1: Making quality decisions quickly requires that we trust our data

Legacy practices

With that in mind, we need to first look at legacy practices for assessing equipment and process health in a factory. Often, events are assessed in silos based on their domains, with equipment being the domain of the process engineer. When there is an equipment error event, the equipment engineer analyzes tool data to recommend a resolution to the problem. The SPC engineer’s domain is the product. When there’s a SPC event, this person reviews metrology charts to prescribe action. Hopefully, they talk to each other, but that’s not typically the case.  Many battery manufacturers are expanding, setting up factories around the globe, and equipment engineers may be based in the organization’s home country while the process engineers are in the factory.  Being able to take action across domains, languages and time zones requires a high cost which is realized through throughput, impact on product quality, and capital investment.

Creating a unified platform

Integration of these domains can drastically reduce that cost, and that requires creating a unified platform. For us, unification represents integration at a core level across all process control systems and requires:

  • A standardized data structure, which is critical for advanced analysis and AI/ML applications.
  • Shared tools to help standardize our action and reaction to events.
  • A consistent UI which provides the same look and feel across applications.
  • Universal management to streamline the administration of the applications.
  • A standardized knowledge base that enables us to reuse expertise and lower the overall investment.
  • Architecture designed to scale as factories grow.

Faster event detection

Integrating these systems to de-silo the process changes how equipment and process health is assessed. It enables a new practice through which an event would trigger a combined action plan with the ability to assess data across domains. This results not only in resolution of the event, but in the ability to optimize the process at the same time. A better analysis across domains enables faster detection of events—helping you migrate from a reactive to proactive approach.

Conclusion

A holistic view of the equipment and process health leads to better, first-time-right decisions and streamlines the connectivity of systems, enabling engineers to make high-quality decisions faster. This mix of integrated systems and shared access among team members lowers the impact of events and costs associated with them. In this way, manufacturers can improve factory performance quickly without compromising quality.

About the Authors

Picture of Agnes Sowa, Battery Manufacturing Segment Manager
Agnes Sowa, Battery Manufacturing Segment Manager

Agnes is the segment manager overseeing battery manufacturing and strategic alliances. Prior to joining Applied Materials Automation Product Group, Agnes was Manager of Smart Factory Partnerships at Panasonic Connect, overseeing manufacturing technology implementations of productivity, automation, MES and maintenance software. She holds an M.B.A. in Finance from DePaul University, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Picture of Christopher Reeves, Global Product Manager, E3
Christopher Reeves, Global Product Manager, E3

As the Global Product Manager for the Applied E3 automation platform, Chris is responsible for the product planning and execution throughout the product lifecycle. Prior to joining Applied Materials Automation Products Group, he was a senior engineer for process and equipment controls at GlobalFoundries. Chris earned his Bachelor of Arts in Physics and Master of Science in Secondary Education and Teaching from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

About the Author

Picture of Agnes Sowa and Christopher Reeves
Agnes Sowa and Christopher Reeves
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