Jerome Reygrobellet presented the STMicroelectronics application where various TIBCO technologies including CEP were used to improve operational efficiency in the their manufacturing processes by “identifying and removing non-value-added tasks” as production proceeded. STM are in the semiconductor business - $10B in sales in 2010, 53,000 employees, and 14 production sites around the world, and launched this productivity improvement program in 2007, with the IT project started in 2008. The first version of the application was delivered in 9mths (June 2009). The project involved using RFID to track and trace the production components, and a “Smart and aware Sampling Tool” to optimise the amount of manual testing at each stage of the production process. The goal was to achieve a >10% improvement in production efficiency and achieve an ROI of less than a year - in fact the results for the first version were an improvement of 14% and an ROI of < 6 months. Impressive.

My thanks to TIBCO colleague Philippe Amiel for pointing out to me the recent announcement of a TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP customer in the highly competitive semiconductor manufacturing business.

STMicroelectronics, one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, is using TIBCO’s event-driven and real-time messaging software to simplify and optimize quality control across the semiconductor chip manufacturing process on 200mm silicon wafers.

Silicon wafer production operators need a lot of information to do their jobs, requiring them to seek out and connect to multiple systems and information sources during the manufacturing process. With this in mind, STMicroelectronics has created a highly dynamic IT platform environment to help increase productivity by enabling:

* Quicker turnaround of workloads - 24,000 tasks per day - by actively pushing crucial information - such as the precise location of materials in the 10,000m2 clean room required to complete the next job - to operators as they need it
* Heightened production quality levels that are tailored to meet specific customer requirements by dynamically modifying the sampling of wafers according to external ‘events’, such as time elapsed since the last production equipment maintenance
* Faster on-boarding of new manufacturing staff via quicker and easier training - new staff consult a single information source for all details of the job in hand

The new IT platform environment being implemented at STMicroelectronics 200mm-wafer semiconductor-chip manufacturing site at Crolles in France will leverage TIBCO BusinessEvents^TM, TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks^TM and TIBCO Rendezvous® software. This new system is part of a wider global initiative aimed at enhancing the company’s efficiency and global market competitiveness.

“The manufacture of silicon wafers is a complex process, with several hundred key steps. TIBCO’s solutions play an important role in allowing us to deliver seamless quality control and real-time manufacturing information, allowing us to increase productivity without any dip in the quality of our product,” comments Jérôme Reygrobellet, IT Project Manager, STMicroelectronics’ Crolles 200 site. “This will be instrumental in ensuring the continued competitiveness of our Crolles 200 site. We expect to see rapid return on investment from these deployments, and have also designed these solutions to be easy to integrate and roll out at other STMicroelectronics sites globally in the future.”

Unfortunately the PR does not talk about numbers or values to support the ROI - but I understand the value proposition is significant… Congratulations to the STM and TIBCO France team!