Transcript
The challenges manufacturers face are everywhere, from process problems to equipment issues. One challenge that often flies under the radar, that is, until it’s too late, is issues with the software and servers that are critical in supporting factory operations. If a process tool goes down, it’s inconvenient.
But if your MES goes down, the entire factory goes down with it. In this video, we’ll take a look at the SmartFactory Monitor, a system specially designed to monitor all those supporting systems to prevent downtime and to keep your factory running smoothly. Your factory’s uptime is critical, and you almost certainly have metrics in place to monitor it and quality programs in place to improve it.
After all, keeping product moving through the factory and processing correctly are keys to your company’s profitability. And your manufacturing software systems all play a key role in both productivity and quality. That is, until something stops working.
Yes, we all hate it when that happens, but it does from time to time. A server goes down, or a network issue, or the power is accidentally shut down to the whole server room because of a tool install that’s happening nearby. The result is unplanned downtime, sometimes for the entire factory.
And that is a significant business impact. How many times has that happened in your factory? And how long did it take your IT team to respond to the problem and resolve it? How did it affect your production? And perhaps most importantly, how did it affect your company’s profits? The impact isn’t trivial. For a modest, low-volume wafer fab, an hour of unplanned downtime can have a $10,000 impact on the company’s bottom line.
Just an hour! For a medium-volume fab, it’s more like $100,000. And for a state-of-the-art, high-volume wafer fab, it can be as much as a million dollars. The painfully obvious question then is, how can we reduce or even avoid unplanned downtime for our manufacturing software systems? And the answer is using SmartFactory Monitor.
SmartFactory Monitor is a real-time monitoring software solution that allows you to identify problems and facilitates corrective action before your production systems are impacted, any of your production systems. In its most basic form, it provides a customizable, easy-to-digest dashboard showing the current state of your production systems.
This makes it almost trivial to see and send a notification when a problem occurs. Customizability is a key feature. It’s possible to create custom visualizations to display performance trends over time.
And it has predictive analytics capabilities that allows detection of performance anomalies before they become production impacts. SmartFactory Monitor runs on modest hardware in a small process footprint using your choice of OS. And perhaps best of all, it’s pre-integrated with other products in the SmartFactory software portfolio.
SmartFactory Monitor keeps track of all your manufacturing software and systems. The applications, the databases, and the servers, both Windows and Linux. The system monitors in real-time system performance logs, error logs, event logs, application logs, system logs, server logs, anything and everything that can provide a clue to system performance and health.
Everything is aggregated into Splunk, software that captures, indexes, and correlates real-time data that can then be used to generate automated notifications and create visualizations to highlight trends and spot problems. And it can be used as training data for machine learning algorithms that enable predictive analytics so issues can be identified and resolved before they become problems in the factory. Pre-built dashboards are available to get you up and running quickly, monitoring all your system logs.
And using Splunk, you can easily visualize system performance and detect trends, anomalies, and outliers using sophisticated prediction algorithms developed by Applied Materials engineers. To ease the load on your IT staff, we also offer optional remote monitoring for your production systems. This is a 24x7x365 service provided by Applied Materials’ own Global Information Systems support staff to monitor production and maintain performance, stability, and high availability of your manufacturing software and systems.
And if you purchase the supporting server hardware from Applied Materials, we can also include on-site hardware repair services for your SmartFactory Monitor installation. Experienced teams supporting remote monitoring are located around the world to provide continuous support for your factory wherever it’s located. Our team can help you get up and running quickly with SmartFactory Monitor in just a couple of weeks for basic production monitoring and a typical installation.
It’s only one additional week to add AI-based log analytics capabilities. And if you opt for remote monitoring, just a couple of more weeks to get you set up with a fully managed solution supported by experienced teams that will monitor your factory systems continuously. SmartFactory Monitor provides a comprehensive set of production monitoring capabilities to address many of the key support system challenges that manufacturers encounter.
The primary objective is to reduce unplanned factory downtime by decreasing the time it takes to identify and resolve system problems and, indeed, to prevent factory impacting problems altogether through performance trend analysis and predictive analytics. The result is increased system and application availability, improved operational efficiency, and, ultimately, increased profitability. SmartFactory Monitor provides the ideal monitoring solution with its comprehensive feature set, the ability to visualize system state and performance trends, quickly detect and even predict system failures, 24×7 global support for remote monitoring, and backed by a team you can trust that understands manufacturing.
Sound interesting? Reach out to us to learn more about SmartFactory Monitor. We’d be happy to schedule a technical session with your IT team to discuss your system and learn more about your system performance pain points. If you like what you see, and we think you will, we’ll be delighted to add you to the queue to install SmartFactory Monitor at your factory.
SmartFactory Monitor. It’s the ideal solution.
