Experiment Management#

During process or product development, it’s necessary to carry out a series of controlled variations with the purpose of understanding whether the variation effect is positive or negative. There are many types of variations possible, such as testing new materials, new suppliers, new recipes, new equipment, new durables (e.g.: reticles) and new methods. An experiment consists in the design of such set of variations and the subsequent execution in the shop floor. Furthermore, in the case that it’s possible to identify and track sub-materials individually (such as the case of semiconductor wafers), it’s important to be able to define multiple variations for specific sub-materials for the same lot. There are also particular challenges when trying to combine experiment lots with production lots, especially in high-volume manufacturing – the execution of such experiment must be as smooth and transparent as possible to both the operators and systems applications.

The Experiment Management module supports both the design of the experiment (DoE) and the execution of the experiment. Because it’s a fully integrated module, the execution of the experiment is completely transparent to both the users and the applications that support manufacturing operations. The experiment lots are tracked and processed just as any lot with the variations being set and enforced automatically by the system.

This feature of Critical Manufacturing MES is a enabler for efficient learning since it accelerates it narrows the learning curve. It increases visibility, tracking and monitoring of experiments, as well as it increases operational efficiency, essentially mitigating human errors.

Available guides#

Table: Experiment Management Tutorial guides