[MA] Towards a Unified Automated Photomask Order Process

Toppan Photomasks is one of the leading manufacturers of photomasks in the world. It has a software department internally known as ``Front End Development'' also called FEDEV, which works with business process automation of sensitive customer data and creates software processes MDP(Mask data preparation) fed to the manufacturing.

The company currently has many customers that provide orders for Photomask manufacturing as input in various formats and communication channels. Some examples include PDF, Excel, Word, Email, Text, XML, etc. The final output of this is a standard template that is created by their software named iMask. iMask is an internal tool that requires intermediate internal output to be uploaded in a format, called iXML. Since the input comes in various formats, many processes have been built to extract the required parameters and generate the intermediate internal output and provide them as input to iMask for starting the Data prep/manufacturing process. The Development Team (FEDEV) in Dresden is now looking to create a framework that can standardize and unify this process for ease of access, usability, maintainability, and reduced manual touch time.

The goal of this thesis is to develop and test a standard and unified framework that provides a standard process for order entry to optimize this part of the business. The business need is to create a GAOEF (Generic automation OE Framework) to transform all the different inputs into a standard internal output (iXML). The values within the output file must be uploaded accordingly in iMask. The proposed solution will be a Full Stack Development prototype using the Django framework.

• A Literature Study to identify related approaches
• A user interface that can provide features for file extraction from different channels.
• Provide a database for customer specification (including data table) for data extraction.
• A backend with the ability to extract and parse the data according to the required output file (i.e. iXML).
• A complete framework that includes the above in a modular structure.
• An evaluation that shows the feasibility of the approach using at least 3 customer orders
• A test suite for regression testing
• A developer and user documentation

Betreuer: Sebastian Götz