Services

Legacy MES

The obsolescence of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) presents a huge challenge to fab IT departments. The following are some of the main issues manufacturers with legacy solutions face:

End-of-Life Support

  • Increased support risk and cost
  • Lower quality and slower support

Maintenance & Operational Cost

  • Higher cost of obsolete and proprietary technologies
  • Higher cost of maintaining add-ons & customizations

Effort to Modify, Extend & Integrate

  • Higher cost of adding and changing functionality
  • Slower response time to business changes

Altogether, if no action is taken, these issues translate into Increased Costs, Increased Risks and Missed Revenue.

To address these challenges, Critical Manufacturing offers two areas of specialized services: Legacy MES Enhancements and MES Migration Services.

Critical Manufacturing’s personnel have a unique combination of business and technical expertise, that make us the perfect partner for your legacy MES enhancement project.

  • Solid experience in MES systems, namely in Workstream, PROMIS and FAB300
  • Extensive domain knowledge in semiconductor Frontend and Backend production
  • Unique state-of-the-art IT technology know-how

Typical projects in this area are:

Equipment Integration

  • Collect Engineering Data from Equipment and load them into Engineering databases or attach them to MES contexts
  • Download or select recipe at the equipment
  • Automate MES transaction for more reliable information, e.g. equipment state change

Reporting and Data Analysis Solutions

  • Extract, merge and load from different data sources into a single Data Warehouse or Analysis System
  • Solutions for online analysis of data, including filtering and drill-down
  • Solutions for easy creation and sharing of reports based on MES data and other sources

Custom GUI Developments and GUI Enhancements

  • Web or desktop based GUI's, acting as thin presentation layer on top of the robust server-side

Custom application development, tightly integrated into the MES system

  • Planning, Strategy & Solution Architecture
  • Requirements Analysis, Design, Development & Test
  • Project Management
  • Quality Assurance

Your new MES will help you Reduce Costs, Reduce Risks and Increase Revenue.

However, the migration itself is a very complex process, as the following topics need to be considered:

  • Migration of Master Data
  • Reporting Systems
  • Historical Information
  • Integration with other Applications
  • Deployment plans and procedures, including SW, HW and people
  • Risk Mitigation and Fallback Solutions
  • Hand-over to Operations & Support

The following are the different scenarios you might consider for migrating an MES system:

There's no right or wrong strategy: just one that better fits your needs.

Critical Manufacturing's resources have an invaluable experience in migrating MES solutions in running facilities with minimum production disruption and can assist you in this complex but extremely important process.