WWK Signs IP Acquisition Agreement for Ultra-Fast, Resource Driven Simulation Technology

Business Wire, Feb 22, 2005

PLEASANTON, Calif. -- Wright Williams & Kelly, Inc. (WWK), a cost & productivity management software and consulting services company, announced today it has reached an agreement with Dr. Lee Schruben of the University of California, Berkeley for the acquisition of intellectual property (IP) involving ultra-fast, resource driven (RD) manufacturing simulation. This technique has been proven to be up to 70x faster than Job Driven (JD) simulation approaches.

Wright Williams & Kelly, Inc. has a long history of providing fast simulators to industrial clients. WWK's Factory Explorer(R) is based on the same "event-graph" technique employed by Dr. Schruben but was designed to provide the additional details required in job driven simulation. Even so, Factory Explorer(R) has been benchmarked with industry standard data sets to be more than ten times faster than other job driven simulators. Additionally, simulation speeds in excess of 3.5 million lot moves/minute are achieved with modest laptop computers (1.8 GHz, 256Mb DRAM) running standard Windows operating systems.

"We are very pleased to reach this agreement with Dr. Schruben," states David Jimenez, President of WWK. "The ability to further reduce execution times on complex manufacturing simulations is vital to our client base. With competing products, you are forced to choose between the multiple runs needed to map out a response surface and the fact that the answer may be too late to drive critical business decisions. With the addition of Dr. Schruben's IP to our product portfolio, we believe that our clients will no longer need to make that trade-off."

WWK further indicated it is looking to partner with potential end users of this technology to ensure that the resulting commercialization meets industry needs. Potential further enhancements include the ability to import data from other simulation platforms to provide easy access to the new RD simulator.

"I expect that the speed advantages from using event relationship graphs to create fab and tool simulations will have a major impact on the industrial use of simulation," stated Dr. Schruben.

Dr. Lee Schruben is Chairman of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and a Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the faculty at Berkeley, he was on the Operations Research and Industrial Engineering faculty at Cornell where he held the A. Schultz Professorship in Engineering. He received his PhD from Yale and is a Fellow of the Institute for Management Science and Operations Research. Professor Schruben's research interests are in simulation modeling and analysis methodologies with a broad range of applications including biopharmaceutical production and supply chains, semiconductor manufacturing and equipment modeling, entertainment and banking, food services, and golf course design and operation. The Semiconductor Research Corporation, National Science Foundation, the Navy and Air Force, Intel, ATT, General Electric, Bethlehem Steel, Digital Equipment, Battelle, Kodak and the National Research Council have been sponsors of his research.

With more than 2,800 users worldwide, Wright Williams & Kelly, Inc. is the largest privately held operational cost management company serving technology-dependent and technology-driven companies. WWK maintains long-term relationships with prominent industry resources including International SEMATECH, SELETE, Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI), and national labs and universities. Its client base includes most of the top 10 semiconductor manufacturers and equipment and materials suppliers as well as leaders in thin film record heads, magnetic media, flat panel displays, and solar panels.

WWK's product line includes TWO COOL(R) for detailed process step level cost of ownership (COO) and overall equipment efficiency (OEE), PRO COOL(R) for process flow and test cell costing, Factory Commander(R) for full factory capacity analysis and activity based costing, and Factory Explorer(R) for cycle time reduction and WIP planning. Additionally, WWK offers a highly flexible product management software package that helps sales forces eliminate errors in product configuration and quotation processes.