Critical Manufacturing offers integrated quality management tools

Product Briefing Outline: Critical Manufacturing’s cmNAVIGO 2.0 Solar Edition allows photovoltaic manufacturers to combine a highly flexible and pre-customized rich set of manufacturing execution and analytical solutions with tightly integrated quality tools. The MES software is designed to have a unique modeling versatility, enabling it to respond to the most demanding and complex scenarios in manufacturing plants.

Problem: While solar manufacturers keep looking for new ways of achieving lower costs and higher throughputs, they face manufacturing processing challenges that require continuous monitoring and adjustment of process and equipment variables. Further optimizations without tight control of such parameters and variables will inevitably result in lower yields and quality problems. Examples are the associated sawing and handling of ever thinner wafers as these reach critical dimensions.

Solution: cmNAVIGO 2.0 Solar Edition introduces a complete set of integrated Quality Management tools, including Statistical Process Control (SPC), Process compliance and Exception Management. In addition, the MES Software use an interactive Microsoft ‘Silverlight 3.0’ based web-interface, has been customized to allow:  Flexible modeling for all PV manufacturing materials, products and flows, for Crystalline Silicon and Thin-Film production lines; Advanced hierarchical material tracking , with sub-material tracking – ideal for modeling batches and lots of ingots, bricks, wafers, or for batch panels in thin-film lines; Tracking and traceability of durables, such as crucibles; Manual and automatic data collection, with sampling, aggregations and calculations; User customizable dashboards with online production line status; Pre-configured reports for most common KPI's such as cycle-time, yield, uptime, PPH, MTBF, MTTR, …; Pre-set data warehouse cubes for material and resource, for advanced analytical operations.

Applications: Crystallization, Wafering, Cell Manufacturing and Module Assembly

Platform: Navigo’s architecture, built on Critical Manufacturing Foundation, allows seamless integration with other manufacturing applications and layers, enabling total leverage of interoperable services and packaging of complex business processes.
All graphic interaction is based on Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 web technology.

Availability: June 2010 onwards.