Transcript
Okay, so my name is Selim Nahas. I’m the director of process quality automation at Applied Materials. I’ve been in the industry since 1995.
SmartFactory is essentially the development and investment that we made into building an ecosystem that allows you to capture, learn, and embed the behavior into automation of all the things that you need to do, to manage a process in a factory. So ultimately, I’m big on highlighting the fact that without people and understanding, you can’t get anywhere. And so I think it’s about questioning, how do we do that? How do we basically build an ecosystem that helps people build an understanding of the processes, the intricacies of the process, and how do we ultimately decide what we’re going to put back into an automation behavior in the factory itself? The truth is, every time we’ve ever gone through an exercise of figuring out how we can step-by-step discern something or automate something, we realize, oh goodness, we really can automate this.
That, I think, is the biggest differentiator of what we do. And that is not possible with just any system. That’s something that’s very specific to the way this platform is architected, how we’re looking to connect things, how we’re looking to make them tangible.
That’s the innovation, in my opinion. So it’s broad. It’s not a singular thing.
It’s across-the-board for a lot of things. The industry is not the same across the board. So the world is not the same to everybody.
I think that where the customer really recognizes the SmartFactory value is in realizing that it’s not a point solution. It’s a roadmap to a whole bunch of solutions that when you sum them all up, they’re much more than a quarter of a percent or half a percent. And that’s when they start to see it. And they recognize that because they know that historically, they’ve done it in fragments. And now they have a roadmap that they can pursue. So it’s more consolidated. It’s the investment, is with one vendor. Therefore, they have a lot more sway and say on what goes into that roadmap. And therefore, they also understand what to expect, when to roll it out, what it’s going to cost to roll it out, and so on.
So predictability, stability, and the ability to continue to grow and maintain it as they need. So they don’t have to spend all the time unless they foresee the need to do so. That’s the value that they really gain.
It’s not a technical value only. It’s a relationship value. And that’s only possible with players that are large enough to basically invest in and develop things over many customers and many years.
