How Does Ascari Relate to Your Industry ? (Alphabetical Order)
Automotive Components and Assemblies
The Automotive Industry is the home of many Statistical Quality methods with a long tradition of utilising product quality information with applied statistics. This industry to date has unfortunately been a foundation for a number of parallel silo systems including SPC which has traditionally been considered an independent application.
The full traceability of products produced is essential to the global automotive supply chain and manufacturers in this area are recognising that they must have systems in place that are flexible for future business requirements and provide full traceability of parts manufactured or assembled.
Ascari provide a number of services for the automotive component industry. These services include a technical design and software creation service that builds solutions that augment an organisations existing systems. An example could be additions to SAP for simple shop-floor tracking and traceability. Ascari can also provide configurable manufacturing systems if a customer has no existing system and also Manufacturing Portals for collecting and displaying all Manufacturing Business Intelligence and Quality Statistics throughout the organisation.
Medical Devices / Pharmaceutical
The Medical Device Industry as well as the whole Pharmaceutical Industry is facing ever increasing requirements for productivity improvement. Partially due to stringent FDA regulations for electronic records and a fairly conservative approach to quality assurance these industries have tended to be left behind in productivity improvement driven by the latest information technology revolution.
However, things are changing! A new set of best practices and industry guidelines called Process Analytical Technology (PAT) is emerging. The idea behind PAT is to introduce a new Risk Based Approach for taking traditional Quality Assurance to the next level. In this approach, advanced quality statistics as well as modern web centric IT solution architectures are necessary to enable organisations to adopt and adapt to this new paradigm.
The term "Process Analytical Technologies (PAT)" has been used to describe "a system for designing and controlling manufacturing through timely measurements (i.e. during processing) of critical quality and performance attributes for raw and in-process materials and with the goal of ensuring final product quality".
Together with our technology partner Predisys, Ascari can deliver the next generation Risk Based Approach solutions that are FDA CFR 21 Part 11 compliant, allow greater insight and understanding of your manufacturing processes, provide real-time or rapid feedback controls, potentially reduce development and production time and minimize risks of poor process quality and reduce regulatory concerns.
MEMS / Semiconductor
Some of the greatest challenges in Hi-tech Electronics and the Semiconductor Industry are the shortening product life cycles, the increasing number of concurrent product introductions and the explosive growth of data generated in manufacturing systems. All too often the wealth of data collected within the manufacturing process is not analysed in a timely manner. Legacy MES (Manufacturing Execution System) software can be inflexible and simply not deliver real-time information to the people that need it at the time they need it. European Semiconductor and MEMS companies are under increasing commercial pressure to keep down labour costs. Always maximise efficiencies, reduce manufacturing costs.
Ascari have a wealth of experience working with High-technology companies and have many services and solutions that address the particular needs of these organisations. From rapidly configurable and fully integrated traceability, quality and manufacturing operations management software from our partner Eyelit to web-centric high volume rapid data analysis and SPC solutions integrated in Microsoft SharePoint from our partner Predisys, Ascari can use these applications, if appropriate to build scalable and flexible manufacturing systems capable of running even the largest global manufacturing operations.
Ascari's automation design team can look at implementing factory automation solutions that operate stand-alone or integrate with your existing factory systems to reduce scrap, reduce labour overheads and improve manufacturing efficiencies.
OLED / Displays and Plastic Electronics
These exciting and newer industries are typically starting their volume manufacturing operations. Processes are perhaps not quite stable for volume manufacturing and the key drivers for these businesses are to improve their processes, find new customers and markets and establish volume manufacturing facilities.
Ascari can provide help to these organisations in a number of ways. Firstly we can help with the design of the systems required for volume manufacturing. If required, we can recommend and implement appropriate systems that are flexible, rapidly configured and fully scaleable which allows you to start manufacturing sooner and more importantly obtain accurate manufacturing data for product improvement. Also, for the research and development activity required Ascari can provide web-centric systems that link up the design engineers with the manufacturing process results.
Photovoltaic / Solar
Green Technology and Renewable Energy will provide energy for the world's ever increasing demand for power. The silicon and glass process used to manufacture some solar panels has similar processes to the traditional semiconductor manufacturing process.
Although there are differences in the manufacturing process from that in semiconductor and the volumes of data generated during the process are significant, Ascari can use our wealth of experience gained in Semiconductor and MEMS to bring operational excellence tools honed in the semiconductor industry over decades to PV organisations.
From technical architecture design of entire systems to high volume but rapid data analysis and SPC systems based on our partners software technology, Ascari are perfectly positioned to work with Photovoltaic manufacturers ensuring that any solutions are based on best practice and built from a firm foundation.
Ascari's design and project management experience can be used to implement:
- Integration and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Platforms for Factory Management
- Factory Automation for XML and SECS/GEM tools
- MES Project Implementation
- System Architecture Design
- Massive Volume Data Analysis portals for Six Sigma and Data Analysis Programmes
Other Manufacturing
Some of the tools, techniques and software applications that have been used in High Technology manufacturing over the past 20 years are highly suited to other industries looking to make performance improvements. Six Sigma came out of the Semiconductor Industry as did Manufacturing Execution (MES) software that provided then and continues to provide today full traceability, improved throughput, reduced inventories and improved equipment utilisation.
Ascari apply some of the most appropriate best practices from these industries to other manufacturing sectors to improve their capability.