Smart Manufacturing Stakeholders and Their Requirements

An important maxim of performance management is “You get what you measure.” This is largely true whether you are talking about employees, organizations, processes, time management, sports teams, or - to highlight a current global industry topic - Smart Manufacturing.The techniques for measuring the performance of a Smart Manufacturing facility are like those in regular use at most production factories: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The major differences are the number of stakeholder types responsible for achieving the KPI targets, and the breadth of available technologies they can apply in the process.Given the level of automation in today's leading semiconductor manufacturing plants, the most important tools these stakeholders have are the manufacturing applications that provide data analysis, decision support, production scheduling, process monitoring and control, yield management, and a host of other capabilities necessary for running a profitable enterprise in a hyper-competitive industry. In a Smart Manufacturing environment, these applications may interact not only with physical entities in the factory, but also components of its so-called “digital twin” to perform their functions.However, regardless of the overall system architecture or specific technologies used in these applications, they all depend on good data... and lots of it. And most of this data comes directly from the manufacturing equipment, which may number in the thousands for a high-volume factory. As a result, the importance of rich equipment models and robust integration standard for accessing that information cannot be overstated.This relationship between the KPIs, stakeholders, applications, and equipment is shown in Figure 1 below.