Transcript
I’m Dan Meier. I’m the Director of MES Strategy at Applied Materials. MES stands for Manufacturing Execution System.
This is the software system that really is at the hub, the core of manufacturing software systems throughout manufacturing. So the Applied SmartFactory, I think, is really interesting in that it’s unique among the industry. A lot of companies have software that is useful for manufacturing and a lot of individual capabilities, statistical process control or yield management or things like that, but what really sets the SmartFactory suite of software apart is the integration between all of these pieces.
We have not only best of class capabilities within each of the software categories within manufacturing, but we also have best of class, in fact there’s no better, integration across all of the products within the suite. Normally a manufacturer would have to purchase individual products and then write glue layers, have their software engineers glue these together to create some kind of integration between all of them. And these glue layers are very expensive and very time consuming to write and whenever the software vendor makes a change to their software, it can actually break these glue layers that the manufacturers are creating for themselves.
One of the advantages of the SmartFactory software suite is that we provide all the glue layers to create that integration and it doesn’t break. It acts as an integrated whole. I think that’s very very important.
So MES, it does one thing very very well and that’s to organize everything that’s happening in manufacturing. And I say that kind of hyperbolic, it’s more than just one thing, obviously. The MES defines processes, but it also defines the resources that are used for those processes,
the equipment that’s used, the process recipes that are used on the individual equipment at particular process steps. It also defines if you need to use any parts or other kinds of materials or chemicals at each individual process step. It keeps all of that organized, it keeps it all sorted out, it keeps it all straight so that you can manufacture your product repeatably and correctly every time.
That’s what companies are looking for. So the MES is really at the core, of the heart of what we would call a larger Computer Integrated Manufacturing system that includes the MES and a lot of other capabilities as well.
