GEM Precare Case Study: Semiconductor Manufacturing
Key Benefits
- 24% improvement in availability
- 10% improvement in annual performance
- 5% increase in energy cost savings
- 7% increase in revenue
About the client
The client is a tier 1 semi-product and factory owner having multiple factories worldwide and a market cap of over $3B. The client specializes in the manufacturing of power, discrete semiconductor, and passive electronic components and owns multiple machines for this purpose. The client was using Applied Materials manufacturing execution systems, Nation Instruments’ OptimalPlus+, and machine OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) for their standard manufacturing requirements, such as collection, cleaning, and aggregation of data from multiple manufacturing locations, its analysis, and mining for coherent information.
Problem statement
While this investment in continuous improvement using high-quality legacy machines sets the client apart from its competitors, it also required heavy manual work. Digital OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) and Predictive Maintenance is one of the best measurements you can use to optimize production operations, lacking this was preventing the client from improving its production operations. Lacking digital, and having partial human data collection, the client was unable to identify losses, track and benchmark progress, and optimize the productivity of manufacturing equipment. Additionally, the client was facing issues like human erroneous data, and limitations of its own solution.
The solution
The client learned about the GEM Precare SaaS Predictive Analytics Industrial IoT Platform, which enables manufacturers to make an almost seamless transition to Industry 4.0 while maintaining their legacy machine investments, allowing them to take advantage of the potential of real-time access to machine data to improve efficiency, productivity, and quality.
The solution deployment started in 2019 with the following products:
- Precare Cloud (On-Premise Edition): To perform machine data aggregation and storage, training and validation of machine learning models for machine vision and predictive maintenance, computation of KPIs, and display of data on dashboards
- Precare Edge: To perform complex edge processing of machine digital twin data in real-time for latency-sensitive tasks, such as status and alarm notifications, as well as machine vision
- OEE Availability, Performance, and Quality Packages: To gain important insights on how to efficiently improve your manufacturing process
GEM started the deployment of the solution using its machine onboarding and OEE frameworks. The company started the deployment on 1 floor with a few machines, and gradually expanded to more machines across the floor, then to a second floor totaling over 80 machines. The customer and GEM are now engaging in discussion regarding further floors and factories in the Philippines, Taiwan, and more.
Key Results
With the deployment of the OEE availability, performance, and quality package solution, the client observed tangible and immediate benefits. The client observed more than a 24% improvement in availability, 10% improvement in yearly performance improvements, a 5% increase in energy cost savings, and an overall more than 7% increase in revenues.
Additionally, the following benefits were also observed:
- Maximum returns on investment in machinery
- Minimum production losses and greater competitiveness
- Rapid improvement in machine performance
- Minimized repetition and defective products eventually add considerably to the cost savings
- Quantification of production efficiency which provides precise insight into the operations process
- Reduced machinery and repair costs
- Improved efficiency of manufacturing plants
Conclusion
Today, the GEM Precare SaaS Predictive Analytics Industrial IOT Platform Is stronger than ever. GEM real-time & Predictive analytics are top of the lines in the Semiconductor, Electronic Manufacturing, and Automotive. GEM enables any customer user, from executive to machine operator, to get critical operational analytics insight, allowing them to take predictive actions. GEM Agents are able to take full advantage of the hardware they run on for complex event processing at the edge rather than in the cloud. It allows real-time remote monitoring and visualisation via the cloud of critical parameters and signals with notifications for alarms and other events. This significantly helps manufacturing organisations reduce latency for time-critical monitoring and control applications.




