Applied SmartFactory Asset Trace is an automated management system for tracking, monitoring, and optimizing the usage, maintenance, and life cycle of a fab’s durables and consumables. A durable is essentially a mobile extension of a tool — a reticle, carrier, probe card, pump, valve, burn-in board, socket, or trolley — while consumables such as gases, chemicals, and targets are used up during production. For fab operations, the practical question is simpler than the inventory problem it looks like: where is the durable, and what state is it in. Answering that automatically is what keeps equipment utilized and stops the wrong durable from reaching a tool.
Applied SmartFactory Asset Trace reduces scrap by 6–8% attributable to human error, contamination, and material quality, and improves equipment utilization by 3%. Locating a durable and knowing its state means the correct one is used, maintained, and stored properly, which is what protects yield. Automating tracking that teams otherwise do by hand also removes labor overhead.
A durable is essentially a mobile extension of a tool — a reticle, carrier, probe card, pump, valve, burn-in board, socket, or trolley. Consumables such as gases, chemicals, and targets are used up during production.
It tracks, monitors, and optimizes the usage, maintenance, and life cycle of durables and consumables, including where each one is and what state it is in at any point in that life cycle.
Fabs report 6–8% scrap reduction attributable to human error, contamination, and material quality. Using the proper durable or consumable, and maintaining and storing it properly, is what removes those three causes.
It connects with factory systems including MES, MCS, SPC, Maintenance Management, and dispatching. With SmartFactory RTD it supports real-time decision-making and WIP management for improved equipment uptime, and with SmartFactory SPC it improves process quality.
State models can be defined rapidly to track and manage the life cycle of any durable or consumable, configured without any programming, and driven by automatic triggers.
Reported results show a 3% improvement in equipment utilization. Knowing the location and state of every durable removes the waiting and searching that otherwise idles a tool between runs.
Asset Trace automates tracking across the full life cycle of durables and consumables, protecting yield and keeping equipment utilized.