The Web in the Factory
Summary
Each plant disciplinemanagement, engineering, production control, machine operations, quality assurance, maintenance, sales and marketing, financeis at once influenced by the other departments dependent upon them for information. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, coined the term World Wide Web for the networked hypertext system he had just invented. Often, parties who are not control engineers need to understand program functionalitythey may be experts in other fields such as pharmaceuticals or biotechnology; they may be regulators who must validate the process; sometimes they are maintenance people who must repair a machine after hours. Oliver Design Inc. (Scotts Valley, Calif.) a supplier of rigid computer disk and wafer cleaning systems, sees significant value in this technology for its customers. John Warobiew, applications software manager at Oliver Design, said, "Many of our customers have manufacturing facilities in several remote locations including Singapore, Ireland and Malaysia.