All manufacturers are looking to improve their manufacturing matrix: Quality, Product Reliability, Yield, and Operational Efficiency. Adoption of new technologies is one such way, as smart manufacturing is becoming the norm, but there is still a long way to go. The pain of new integrations is potentially the biggest issue, as the high costs, both in terms of time and money is off-putting.
Manufacturers live by the mentality of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”, and one way to overcome this resistance to change is to demonstrate the substantial value a new system will have in measurable metrics. OptimalPlus realized that there was a need for a solution that could be easily integrated into the ecosystems already in place and use data analysis tools to supplement what manufacturers already have. OptimalPlus provides manufacturers with lifecycle analytics tools that are product-centric, ensuring that improvements that can be made to their product and manufacturing process are identified and provided as actionable insights.
Over more than a decade, OptimalPlus has built the industry’s most comprehensive analytics solution for the semiconductor arena, enabling customers to improve their yield, productivity, quality and reliability while driving down manufacturing costs. Uniquely, the solution connects customers – leading fabless and IDM semiconductor manufacturers – to their distributed and outsourced manufacturing facilities, giving them unprecedented visibility and control over their operations.
Today, OptimalPlus processes the manufacturing data for 100 billion components annually, and with every piece of data, they are enhancing their solutions to be able to detect anomalies, trace the issue back along the supply chain and ultimately, to correct the source issue. OptimalPlus understood early on that the value of analytics for firms with outsourced operations is limited by the quality and timeliness of the data they receive. Therefore, they made it their mission to collect data close to the source and automate the process of gathering, harmonizing and aggregating it quickly.
OptimalPlus have software agents running on the manufacturing equipment, enabling real-time data collection and real-time actions, taking ownership of the entire data flow, from the factory to headquarters and back again. By collecting the data from the various supplier and production sites, OptimalPlus provides manufacturers with complete supply chain visibility on every component. The company’s comprehensive database aggregates a wealth of information from manufacturing operations and powers data analytic tools providing lightning fast access to actionable information.
The database is designed with a unique and optimized schema that connects data across manufacturing silos. It leverages a combination of state-of-the-art database and Big Data technologies to enable fast interactive queries on large datasets. Users can query and aggregate billions of data points with blazing fast performance.
The company recently expanded its services beyond semiconductor and electronics, to now offer their solutions to the automotive industry as well, using a unique product-centric analytics approach to solve similar problems in the Smart Manufacturing environments of these industries.
Similarly, for the automotive and electronics industries, OptimalPlus has expanded their offering to handle electronic, mechanical and mechatronic use-cases, having specific solutions for ADAS systems and automotive power modules. In one early use-case, a tier-1 automotive customer manufacturing EV converters was dealing with several production issues, including excessive and expensive scrap, inefficient manufacturing operations and difficult and time-consuming root-cause-analysis.
With the help of OptimalPlus solutions, they improved the image analytics used in their inspection process to better determine the cause of welding failures. With this improved classification, the system was able to correlate issues to specific settings in the welding equipment, improve the quality of welding and solve many of the manufacturing challenges.
The next big focus for OptimalPlus is to expand their offerings for automotive manufacturers by encompassing the entire vehicle; from the mechanical elements such as welding to the smallest electronic component sourced from a vendor. There are enormous shifts that are occurring in the automotive industry with the integration of complex electronics and other components. Thus, there is a heightened demand for ensuring the reliability of all critical vehicle parts.
With their proven track record and legacy of enabling manufacturing excellence for the semiconductor and electronics industry OptimalPlus is primed and ready to handle the product manufacturing challenges of the ever-demanding automotive industry.
