Project:             Manufacturing Execution System (iWMS)

Client:               VSK Photonics

Dates:               February, 2002, 1999 – September, 2002

Industry:           Opto-Electronics; Manufacturing

Skills Required: Systems Analysis, Design, Development and Programming; Systems Integration; Business Process Analysis; Technical Writing

Situation

·          This startup company designs and manufactures fiber optic devices.

·          The devices are manufactured on fiber optic wafers that are sent through a lengthy manufacturing process broken down into a hierarchical sequence of Procedures, Recipes and Instructions.

·          This manufacturing process is outlined on Excel spreadsheets, which are printed and manually forwarded through the manufacturing process as a document called a Traveler. At each step, required measurements and notes are written on the Traveler.

·          Maintenance and design of these Excel-based travelers requires extensive man-hours, and they provide no way to archive and compare historical manufacturing data since all inputs are hand-written.

·          As wafers move through the manufacturing process, they are routed to various pieces of fabrication equipment.

·          If a machine is down for repair, wafers should not be routed to it. The fabrication personnel need to know the real-time status of the next piece of equipment in the manufacturing process.

Requirements

·          Develop a database system to manage:

§          Wafer inventory and design specifications.

§          Traveler design and maintenance.

§          The ability to assign wafers to a workflow (Traveler).

§          The ability to track where a specific wafer is in the manufacturing process in real-time.

§          The ability to see and modify in real-time the current status of all fabrication equipment.

§          The ability to capture all variables and measurements associated with the manufacture of each wafer.

§          Allow wafers to be re-worked through a previous step in the manufacturing process.

§          Allow wafers to be moved from one Traveler to another mid-stream.

Technologies and Methodologies

·          Microsoft Access XP (2002)

·          Incorporated ActiveX controls (Treeview and Listview) into the Access front-end to provide a highly intuitive and functional front-end.

·          Development of highly complex reports using the following techniques:

§          User-definable criteria screens.

§          Multiple-level subreports, with inter-level variable referencing.

§          Crosstab (pivot) queries.

§          Extensive use of VBA to format report sections “on-the-fly” (via programming OnFormat and other report events) to permit or suppress printing of certain fields or records depending on specified criteria.

§          Use of nested, crosstab, union and join queries as the source of reports.

§          Use of dynamic rowsource queries for reports, where the queries are built dynamically in VBA code from user parameters and then persisted to the database.

§          Provided the ability to export reports to Excel, Word, text or RTF file formats.

·          Use of a split database paradigm (front-end/back-end) to improve system performance over the LAN, with the front-end residing on client workstations and the data back-end residing on a file server.

·          Implementation of Access user-level security with a four-tier permissions model.

Solution

·          Designed an Access XP based Manufacturing Execution System.

·          The database enables engineers to define fiber optic wafer specification parameters and design workflows.

Results

·          Reduced the time it takes to design new Travelers by 90%.

·          Provided real-time access to manufacturing information and fabrication equipment status.

·          Provided the ability to analyze historical manufacturing data and metrics.

·          This system is the first step in the company’s move to a paperless workflow.