anyone surprised at how clunky and ancient the systems are? and how slow they are sometimes? how can we manufacture such modern technology and be left with programs that look like they were designed for Windows 98?
can anyone that came from other companies comment on whether it's the same there, or more modern and/or faster?
I have nothing to compare to, but I imagine we lose a lot of time waiting for things to load. Need some engineer to try to make a name for themselves tackling this
@jckl SiView is very good at what it does, and for that reason it's hard to separate from it. There's also A LOT of experience with it at GF globally. It would also be really difficult to migrate to a completely different MES, as one of our fabs recently did. To make a change we'd need to open a new fab somewhere else with a completely different MES as a POC. Or someone would need to buy GF and move us to whatever they use. Still, the effort would be enormous.
SiView is still reasonably one of the better options on the market for semiconductors. Our main "competitor" also uses SiView (FYI). There's also a robust API. We should take advantage of that and write a custom clients, giving it a modern look and feel, and usability options. That takes money the company isn't willing to spend (IMIT tried already).
Svew (an IBM product by the way) looks like something I wrote in college quarter a century ago. It has the same twitchy UI reactions too. People coming from Intel are saying that their factory systems are even worse. I can't imagine anything worse but there is aways room to sc--w up things I guess?
I am in IMIT, and some of the systems you're talking about (but not naming, thanks!) are probably in my scope.
The way we do things is at least 10 years out of date and there's no way to convince everyone that we should adopt best practices in the industry (IT, not semiconductors). There are varying reasons, but a majority of people are resisting it.
Rant time.
My team is still made up of GF employees, but the IMIT dept. just went through outsourcing. My experience so far: I recently submitted a request and it took the outsourced guy 4 tries to get it right. I have another request from summertime that I'm still waiting to get done, even after several escalations.
Our managers have promised us dedicated time to continue education and work on projects we're interested in, but it makes no sense. Why? Because we're short-staffed and already put in 50+ hours each week. We tell our managers we have no time to do things, and they make these types of promises. Talk about bad faith.
And to your point, for one of the systems I support I can clearly see performance degrading over time. But it's not broken, and people aren't complaining... yet. Why haven't I addressed it? Let me use the phrase everyone else was using last year "the squeaky wheel gets the grease".
Our systems are such a patchwork that if you dig into system A, it might take you though system B to system C, D, E etc. Each system owner is probably different and their motivations aren't the same. This only promotes the reactive behavior we see "if it's not broken, don't fix it".
Also, there's also a revolving door of IMIT leadership. Don't be surprised when a bunch of level 10+s leave after their vestment period. They join, see the dysfunction, then leave when convenient. And look at their recent decisions: microsoft teams/365 and outsourcing. I'm sure they got burnt for those.
Agreed, 1/4 of my day is just waiting for programs. The last semiconductor company I worked at would not tolerate such a thing. No worries as most of employees are paid hourly.
GF does not have a software team. Most companies modify software with inhouse programmers. GF buys the whole package, no upgrades and minimal support. Look at Oracle.
Many older tools still run windows 95/98 due to legacy software/hardware not being updated for newer OS. Sometimes you have to fix it, even if it's not broken.
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@ygj because a few people that came from Samsung have said the same. I figure there are more people here from a broader range of companies
I also get that how something looks and its performance aren't correlated, it literally takes 5 minutes to do something like setting sampling
If you have no comparions, why are you surprised?