Koen De Backer is the vice president of smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence at Micron Technology. He is responsible for driving Micron’s smart manufacturing initiatives and digital operations including capabilities with IoT, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, cognitive computing and machine learning to enhance our business, global operations and product development.
Prior to joining Micron, Mr. De Backer led large-scale operations projects for more than a decade to help clients reduce inefficiencies and achieve excellence in manufacturing, procurement, supply chain and support functions. Most recently, Mr. DeBacker was a partner at McKinsey & Company where he steered the semiconductor consulting practice in Southeast Asia and was one of the firm’s leading experts on applying artificial intelligence and automation techniques across operations and support functions such as finance, human resources and procurement. Additionally, Mr. De Backer consulted with high-tech global clients while working at Deloitte Consulting, Altran Europe and CSC.
Mr. De Backer holds a master’s degree in business administration from INSEAD and master’s degrees in both industrial management and electromechanical engineering from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Presentation Title:
Keynote 1: Scaling from a Front End Smart Manufacturing to a End-to-End Smart Enterprise
Manufacturing has traditionally been the key focus of Industry 4.0 development and deployment. In the Semiconductor industry, this has historically translated into applications and benefits for Front End Operations, which have long been the most challenging and technologically complex step of the semiconductor value chain.
Today however, as complexity grows outside of the four walls of any individual production site and reaches across the entire value chain, Semiconductor companies need to extend innovation beyond Front End.
This is why creating an End-to-End Smart Enterprise that leverages Big Data, Data Science and automation technologies across Manufacturing, Procurement, Supply Chain, R&D/ Product Development and Support Functions (Finance, HR, etc.) is quickly becoming a top prerogative for industry leaders to ensure not only higher productivity, but also greater flexibility and agility.
In this talk, Mr. Koen De Backer will explore some of the key benefit, challenges, and strategies that companies like Micron are experiencing in the transition from Front End Smart Manufacturing to an integrated End-To-End Smart Enterprise.