Every manufacturing process, no matter how simple or complex will always have some requisite features. It will have a basic or a combination ingredients or raw material, certain equipment, tools and of course human beings. Even in a fully automated process, these key components are always present.

Another feature of a manufacturing process is the ‘recipe’ for production or operation of equipment or the entire process. A recipe can be product or equipment specific, it can be considered as a set of instructions, which specify how a task is to be performed; its structure may vary from a single set of simple instructions to a multi-component, multi-step recipe. Today most manufacturing plants either tweak the original recipes prescribed by the equipment vendors or completely modify it, so much so that the recipe becomes their IP or Intellectual property.

Let’s consider a simple process to better understand the importance of a recipe – a screen printing process to print visiting/business cards should do the trick. This process involves a paper substrate and ink/pigment as raw material, a screen printing machine and a die cutting machine as equipment and an operator to print/cut the cards. Now if the requirement from a customer is of a single color card, let’s say, PMS 4525U on a 250 GSM C1S (Coated one side) substrate, the operator is supposed to follow a certain recipe for both the end product and the equipment to get the desired result. First he will use a recipe to mix available base with pigments to get the right PMS color, then use another recipe to, set the printing machine to print the color at exactly the depth and tone on the substrate, to achieve the specified appearance. The final product is obtained when he programs the die-cutting machine to cut the printed substrate in to the required cards.

In the above process, although simplistic, there are three distinct recipes involved, one for making the color, two for printing and third for setting the die-cutting machine. Now, imagine a highly complex process of production like a semiconductor manufacturing unit. It has a complex equipment structure and the equipment may have hundreds of steps to execute before the final product is obtained. To make matters even more complex, almost every single piece of equipment has the capability to be programmed as required and thereby add more variations to the existing recipes.

This is where a Recipe Management System or an RMS comes into reckoning. An RMS, very simply put, is an IT application for managing the recipes of a particular manufacturing unit or factory. It is a system which is supposed to manage the entire set of production recipes, where it is specified how the production equipment should perform their operations; it encompasses and contains individual equipment recipes and that of any subsidiary/additional processes, within the actual production process.

Process Complexity is a factor used for differentiation from competitors and as process complexity largely depends on the way activities are executed in a plant/factory, the ownership and management of recipes at the factory level becomes critical.

An RMS becomes a prerequisite for efficient management and control of recipes in a complex manufacturing process. A modern RMS is used not only to store/display recipes for the entire process, but also to edit them and initiate action through the application itself. To be able to achieve ingenuity coupled with integration and accountability such an application becomes a crucial cog in the wheel of a manufacturing process. The components and features of a sophisticated RMS may vary from Recipe Version Management, to Recipe Archiving, to Maintaining Recipe Integrity, and all these components add to the overall value of the application.

SEMATECH, a not-for-profit consortium founded in 1987 that performs research and development to advance chip manufacturing, published a benchmark of current practices and a roadmap for the future of factory recipe management systems (RMS), that can be found here.

However, it is very important to note that an RMS, although crucial for a modern manufacturing, would be best utilized if used a part of a larger more comprehensive application like a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and integrated into the production equipment control layer. An MES allows a user to perform complex activities spanning over many recipes and equipment, in multiple possible combinations. The more complex the process flow the more important the role of an MES in the process. The application allows real-time process control and helps integrate functions of a process, which may be physically separated.

A modern RMS module, part of a more comprehensive solution shall provide hierarchical recipe objects so that a recipe can re-use recipe modules. A recipe shall contain multiple parameters which can be static or dynamic and contain a recipe body. Downstream, the RMS shall be coupled with the equipment integration layer so that it becomes possible to upload and download recipes to and from the equipment; while upstream the RMS shall be integrated with the MES material tracking so that the right recipe is resolved and instantiated for the material context.

So while making a decision to automate your production process through an MES implementation, and while choosing the application provider, carefully consider the depth with which their application can manage, control, protect and automate the recipes of your production process.

This and other blog entries can be read at Critical Manufacturing’s blog page..

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