MES as the cure for complexity
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Brooks Automation is a leading vendor to the semiconductor industry, counting the top 20 companies as customers.
Besides automation gear for that vertical, Brooks also offers manufacturing execution system (MES); plant scheduling; and other software to multiple verticals via its Brooks Software unit. Automotive, medical device, aerospace & defense, and other manufacturers must address increasing complexity due to higher product mix, more product introductions, and forecast accuracy challenges, says Joe Bellini, president and COO of Brooks Software.
"Not only do these other sectors have challenges in complexity, they also have regulatory issues to comply with," Bellini says. "So these other verticals are evolving with a strong need for this sort of software."
Medtronic in medical device and Honeywell in aerospace are among Brooks' customers. More recently, Affymetrix, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based maker of micro-array products for the biotech sector, bought the Promis MES.
What's needed, contends Bellini, are execution and production monitoring solutions that can spot significant changes in complex manufacturing processes and integrate those events with ERP. To that end, Brooks offers a "hub" interoperability package, as well as composite applications to link with enterprise planning.
Says Bellini, "With composite applications, you can take an enterprise-level application and a plant execution application and combine those with a workflow to make better decisions."
