We used to run this loop for you. You sent us a tool layout and your utility demands; our engineers built the living model, ran the Optimizer, and returned the sized mechanical and electrical distribution. That was deliberate, and we wrote down the condition that would end it. That condition is now met: FacilityConnect is self-serve, and your engineers run the loop themselves.
We argued at the time that a software company delivering its product as a service was the honest answer to a real problem. The argument still holds — it is just no longer the answer.
The input was the hard part
The Optimizer is only as good as the model it runs against, and building that model from real project data is genuine engineering work. Tool lists arrive as spreadsheets in a dozen formats. Utility requirements live in vendor documents, emails, and someone's memory. Demands need diversity treatment that depends on how the fab will actually run.
Handing someone an empty tool and wishing them luck with data entry produces exactly what the industry already has: a powerful system wrapped around unreliable inputs. So for a long time our team did the structuring — tool templates, capacity pools, connections — and owned the quality of the result.
A powerful engine on top of messy data is just a faster way to get the wrong answer.
The bar we set ourselves
We said self-serve would be ready when the system caught input problems the way our engineers do — when templates, validation, and the model itself guarded the quality that people were guarding manually. Not when it was convenient to ship, and not when the market asked for a login page.
That is what changed. Import templates map a messy panel schedule or tool list onto the model and say what is missing before anything is sized. Validation runs against the model, not a spreadsheet, so a demand without a utility type or a connection without capacity surfaces as a problem to fix rather than a number that quietly propagates. The checks our engineers ran by eye are now checks the system runs every time.
What this means in practice
FacilityConnect is fully functional out of the box. Your engineers load the tool layout and the utility demands, run the Optimizer, and get the sized mechanical and electrical distribution back — with the living model behind it. The loop is the same one we ran: capture, optimize, apply, re-run. Nobody is waiting on our team to schedule it.
Everything built during the service years went into this. Every engagement ran the full loop on a real fab with real constraints, and the friction our own engineers hit became the roadmap. The model your engineers run against today is the one that work produced.