Transcript
Applied Materials recently announced the newest addition to its SmartFactory product portfolio, the SmartFactory Alarm Management Solution. In this two-part video, we’re going to take a look at the challenges manufacturers face managing real-time alarms and how the Applied SmartFactory Alarm Management Solution can help overcome these challenges and improve factory productivity. When an event occurs within a factory, it’s common for multiple tools or systems to trigger alarms at the same time.
When that happens, consider the impact on the technicians and operators on the factory floor. Too often they’re overwhelmed with notifications and text messages and pages and emails. It’s time-consuming and tedious to filter through the alarm information overload to determine what’s important and identify the critical problems that need to be addressed.
Manually searching through all the notifications wastes precious time and results in a delayed response, which increases the risk to product and reduces overall factory productivity. Worse still is when false alarms are triggered, alarms for which no response is necessary, but it still takes time to determine this. Or when the same alarm is sent over and over again simply because the originating tool or system continues to repeat the alarm as long as the original condition is unresolved.
It’s not hard to imagine that the technicians and operators receiving all these meaningless alarm notifications might at some point just stop paying attention to them. And can you blame them? Well, at least until someone ignores what turns out to be a really important alarm and a critical tool goes down at the worst possible moment. In the best case, manually searching through all the notifications wastes precious time and reduces factory productivity.
In the worst case, missing a critical alarm notification amidst the noise of false alarms and repeated alarms and too many alarms could result in unnecessary tool downtime, scrapped product, and reduced factory output. What if all the alarms and notifications were already filtered and prioritized before being sent and the false alarms were excluded altogether and only one notification was sent instead of a lot of duplicate alarms? Automating how alarms are handled on tools and systems across the factory could provide many advantages. Automatic filtering could allow notifications to be sent for only meaningful alarms.
Alarms could be automatically prioritized so that when several alarms occur at once, the factory staff could easily determine which to respond to first. Repeated alarms could be automatically suppressed after the very first one, and alarms could be configured to automatically trigger actions like putting a lot on hold or logging a tool down. The primary goal should be to reduce the alarm noise threshold for factory technicians and operators, allowing them to quickly home in on the most important issues and accelerate response and resolution times, freeing them for more productive activities.
Ultimately, where alarms are managed is key. Integrating the management of alarms from tools and systems throughout the factory within a common application and in a consistent manner could provide significant benefits, including accelerating problem diagnosis and resolution, reducing equipment downtime, and increasing tool utilization. And improving alarm visibility for diagnosis and root cause analysis could provide a more holistic view of alarms across the factory in how frequently they occur and how often different alarms from different systems occur at the same time.
As it turns out, Applied Materials has a solution for this, the SmartFactory Alarm Management System. By integrating alarms throughout the factory and automating alarm management within a single system, the SmartFactory Alarm Management System offers a unique alarm management solution for your factory. You can find out more about the capabilities and features of the SmartFactory Alarm Management System in our next video.
