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STEVEN BUDDE, USDATA Corporation, Richardson, TX, USA

ABSTRACT

Semiconductor manufacturing operations are presently facing competitive pressures from all fronts to produce products more efficiently while supporting build-to-order environments. Flexible and agile production systems are now considered a must to enable semiconductor manufacturers to meet these high level objectives. Enterprise production systems (EPS), that consolidate the execution, process control and plant floor environments, are critical to obtaining these objectives as they provide an integrated execution layer that connects the plant floor systems with the corporate planning systems. The EPS market has historically been fragmented into very specific levels of functionality such as manufacturing execution systems (MES) and process control applications. The traditional approach taken by these vendors of embedding process specific knowledge in monolithic systems is no longer adequate to address the competitive pressures driving the semiconductor business today. What is needed is a fresh approach that allows companies to quickly deploy agile production solutions that seamlessly integrate the plant floor systems with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.