Applied Materials: finding high-value lab assets in minutes, not hours

Customer

Applied Materials — Metal Deposition Products (MDP) group

Partner

Microsoft

Use case

Capital assets & equipment

Solution

InThing asset visibility with rapid inventory, asset reservation and perimeter control; handheld RFID readers, eight door-mounted readers and custom clean-room antennas

The challenge

Applied Materials provides equipment, services and software for manufacturing semiconductors, flat-panel displays and solar products. Its MDP group builds multimillion-dollar machines that deposit metal on silicon wafers — and the components inside them are expensive too.

Locating a precious-metal sputtering target, which could cost more than $100,000, meant going from one storage room to the next. When it couldn’t be found, a new one was ordered and expensed. Search missions consumed engineering time, duplicate purchases cut into budgets, and an inability to locate calibration equipment raised ISO compliance risk.

The solution

• Assets were tagged, classified and inventoried with InThing’s rapid inventory and asset reservation applications and two handheld RFID readers.
• Custom antennas provided coverage in clean rooms, and eight RFID readers mounted on doors worked with InThing’s perimeter control to monitor movement in and out of specified areas.
• Assets were classified by specification so engineers could search and identify them quickly.

The results

• Full visibility of capital and expense assets across the lab environment, with on-demand inventories and look-ups
• 600 assets across two buildings inventoried in just two hours
• Search time for a sputtering target down from about 60 minutes to about 5, with 99% accuracy
• $125,000 in unnecessary orders avoided within three months of production, with a forecast of $1 million in annual savings from tracking components
• Better sharing and utilization of equipment, improved tracking of intellectual property and adherence to ISO calibration requirements

InThing’s Asset Visibility solution helped us realize our investment by avoiding unnecessary expenditures in less than three months.

Murali Narasimhan, General Manager, Metal Deposition Products Group, Applied Materials