The recipe management concept established under extremely agile conditions for customized products and due to high integrity requirements in the semiconductor industry. Nevertheless, the present software solution favors a standardized, industry-independent process model. In the near future, systems will be needed to keep the wealth and through Industry 4.0 extremely growing amount of recipes well under control. In digital manufacturing, explicit "product" definitions are needed in terms of "process" IDs. The recipe management system achieves the desired trade-off between the decision-making authorities of decentralized production units with locally present recipes on one hand and the central target definitions for the purpose of an integrative, holistic manufacturing process to create salable products on the other. The permanent changing of process life cycles is strengthened by structured definitions, steered approvals, and scheduled production launches of all recipes to provide the requested integrity. Herein, the protection of Intellectual Property rights is extremely important.
Recipes are physical files that are needed by manufacturing equipment (or cyber physical systems) to conduct desired individual processes. Usually, they are kept locally at the equipment. The content of recipes can be seen as protected and compressed know-how of the original equipment manufacturers in the form of comprehensive configuration data or instructions for their equipment. Therefore in production lines, the usage and the visualization of recipes may significantly deviate from each other which means a particular challenge for manufacturing operations. Using a recipe management system, the safe handling of flexible manufacturing processes is standardized and feasible. The know-how-driven process development is actively supported which is essential for learning organizations.
The new release 5.5 of LineWorks RM recipe management system presents itself with the continued development of validation rules firmly linked to recipes. Logical expressions can be used to establish decision rules that reflect engineering expertise and control the changes. They can be fully shared within the organization. Product manager Dan Cogut is confident: "With the new rules, our customers can enforce their process engineering knowledge much better in practice. For example, it is possible to impose: for this recipe, future changes to a certain parameter may take place only within a tolerance range of 10% to the current value." Furthermore, the software update enables the controlled and efficient roll-out of parameter changes to a mass of affected recipes. Subsequent individual validation cycles ensure that the changes initiated thereby will in fact meet the desired goals. Besides many improvements with respect to function and visualization capabilities, LineWorks RM recipe management system version 5.5 provides new features to reduce significantly implementation times.