Critical Manufacturing releases NAVIGO 2.0 solar edition at Solarcon China 2010

PORTO, PORTUGAL: Critical Manufacturing announces the release of cmNAVIGO 2.0 Solar Edition, a rich Internet Manufacturing Enterprise System (MES) for Advanced Manufacturing that enables photovoltaic manufacturers to combine the high flexibility and pre-customized rich set manufacturing execution and analytical solutions with tightly integrated quality tools.

Critical Manufacturing will showcase cmNAVIGO 2.0 Solar Edition at SOLARCON China 2010, in Shanghai.

Reiner Missale, Critical Manufacturing’s CEO, explains: “While solar manufacturers keep looking for new ways of achieving lower costs and higher throughputs, they reach manufacturing processing challenges that require continuously 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.”

While version one of cmNAVIGO was focused on modeling and execution flexibility in hierarchical WIP tracking, multi-level resource tracking, dispatching, engineering data collection, carrier, consumables and durables management, cmNAVIGO 2.0 introduces a complete set of quality management fully integrated features, including Statistical Process Control, Checklists and Exceptions Management.

cmNAVIGO 2.0 Solar edition has been richly customized to - with a single interactive Silverlight based web-interface – 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; Interactive user customizable dashboards with online production line status; Pre-set 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.