Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

Meet Clare, a member of our Solutions Engineering team. Clare lives in China and is an integral part of our China office. Read on to learn a little bit more about Clare.
How long have you worked at Cimetrix?

I have worked at Cimetrix for 22 months, since May 2018.

Where did you go to school and what is your degree?

I got my Bachelor’s degree at the Harbin Institute of Technology (Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China) and my Master’s degree at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. What is your role at Cimetrix?

I am a Cimetrix Solution Engineer located in China. 

What drew you to Cimetrix originally?

I have known of Cimetrix for many years and have been learning from the Cimetrix website. Cimetrix can be called a mentor for my working in the past few years when it comes to technology standards and expertise. It was great to be able to join Cimetrix and get to know more people as a part of this team.

What do you enjoy most about the work you do?

Sharing my experience and knowledge with others and learning from different people at the same time is what I enjoy most about the work I do.

What do you think it means to provide great customer support?

I think we provide great customer support by not just replying why or what their solution is, but also telling them how to fix their problems on their own.

What is the biggest accomplishment you’ve had at Cimetrix?

My biggest accomplishment is the localization of Cimetrix articles and coordination for EDA Seminars with SEMI China.

How do you deal with challenges that come up at work?

As challenges come up at work I like to just keep learning and consult with all of the experts on our team. Our team is all around the globe and everyone has a special expertise about something, so we are constantly learning from each other.

What’s something you’ve learned while working at Cimetrix?

The passionate support of Cimetrix! It is not only about solving the current problem, we really care about the customer’s need and want to help them to improve their skills and products.

What do you find to be most challenging about your job?

To support our customers’ need for comprehensive understanding of the equipment, the software and factory automation related knowledge. The limited hands-on experience on equipment control software is a big challenge for me.

Do you have a favorite quote or saying? Why?

天道酬勤 (God rewards the diligent)

What are your top 3 favorite books and/or movies?

A Dream in Red Mansions, Gone With The Wind and The Shawshank Redemption.

What’s your favorite vacation spot?

My hometown, Inner Mongolia

2019 was another exciting year for Cimetrix. In our journey as a Smart Manufacturing and Industrial IoT solutions provider, we were able to increase revenues year-over-year to a new record high during a year that saw double-digit revenue drops for capital equipment suppliers in the semiconductor industry. Also, our attention to fiscal discipline enabled us to achieve our tenth consecutive year of profitability and further strengthen our strong cash position.

Cimetrix continues to provide software that makes the world’s most sophisticated and expensive manufacturing equipment smarter, as well as an innovative IIoT platform for the world’s leading factories. We focus on ensuring the success of our worldwide customers with local presence and support. Our global team members in North America, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China and Southeast Asia provide unmatched expertise and technical support to our customers.

For 2020, Cimetrix expects a double-digit increase in revenues as the results of our growth initiatives undertaken over the past several years gain further traction. We believe the foundation of Smart Manufacturing and Industrial IoT begins with smart equipment and smart connections. Furthermore, we believe that Cimetrix is uniquely positioned to help equipment manufacturers and factories in their pursuit of Smart Manufacturing. We will relentlessly pursue understanding our customers’ challenges and providing them with innovative solutions.

From all of us at Cimetrix, we thank our customers, partners and shareholders for the faith and confidence they have placed in us. We will continue to strive for excellence in satisfying our worldwide base of customers and delighting them with innovative new products and solutions.

Sincerely,

Bob Reback
President and Chief Executive Officer

It's time to meet the folks that keep Cimetrix running - our Front Office team! Meet Emily Wang, a Cimetrix Staff Accountant. Read on to learn a little bit more about Emily.

How long have you worked at Cimetrix?

I’ve been working at Cimetrix for about 2 months.

What is your role at Cimetrix?

I am a staff accountant here at Cimetrix.

What drew you to Cimetrix originally?

I found the Staff Accountant position posting on LinkedIn. I had a video interview, and that was the first time I met people from Cimetrix. All of them were very nice and friendly even though they knew almost nothing about me at that time. Among all the companies I have interviewed with, Cimetrix was the first one that had a focus on a personality test. The company’s care about an employee’s personality surprised me and that’s the time I realized this company was looking for someone who really fit the company culture.

What do you enjoy most about the work you do?

This is my first full-time job after college. I find it interesting that the accounting knowledge I learned from books exists in the real world and this knowledge can actually help the growth of a company. It feels amazing knowing that my knowledge can help. Moreover, I am not just doing repetitive daily work at Cimetrix. There are always new challenges and tasks assigned to me. The company always says they want to set me up for success, which encourages me a lot.

What do you find to be most challenging about your job?

I am still learning, and I knew little about practical accounting work when I started working here. It can feel confusing when the real-world scenarios are so different from the theoretical. But the more exposure I get to the practical world, the more I realize that accounting is not just about numbers, but about helping the company be sucessful. 

What are your top 3 favorite books and/or movies?

I don’t watch a lot of movies, but I watch millions of TV series. My top favorite three are: Doctor X, Person of Interest, and Modern Family. The actress in Doctor X, Ryoko Yonekura, is a part of the reason I came to US.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I liked to train my cat when he lived with me, although he never understood. I like video games. My favorite two are League of Legend and Overcooked.

Today is our next edition of the Cimetrix Book Club. Our employees are always striving to develop their skills, share information, and keep up to date with the industry. Part of this effort includes an employee book club that involves many of our team members each month. We will cover some of their favorites from time-to-time here on our blog!

Today's book is called "Don't Make Me Think (Revisited)" by Steve Krug. The book review is by Gabe Hanson, a Software Engineer based in Salt Lake City, UT, USA.

This short but dense book was written to guide software developers through their journey of building user interfaces. While it was targeted specifically for web and mobile user interfaces, the general topics and suggestions presented will benefit almost anyone developing any kind of software. The general theme of the book ties directly with the title: make the end user think as little as possible while using your software.

The book covers topics ranging from general design philosophies, to optimal user interface experiences, and even more nuanced topics like accessibility considerations and color themes. Each of the 13 chapters presents common usability issues found throughout the stages of building a website or mobile application, and discusses how a developer might approach mitigating such problems. For example, chapter 6 discusses how one might build a website that is easy to navigate by using the concepts of "street signs" to help guide the user through your website. This chapter explains simple ways of constructing web pages with easily-locatable buttons and other kinds of navigation techniques to prevent the user from getting lost, frustrated, and eventually leaving your website.

We found chapters like these most valuable because these same ideas can apply to almost every piece of software we build for the manufacturing industry. Given the potentially complicated nature of navigating through an equipment's control software, it is important we design our software to be easy to use and navigate. Not just for convenience, but to reduce user error - something that can help avoid mistakes costing potentially millions of dollars.

Not only was reading the book educational, but it presented itself in a very entertaining and engaging way. Most of the pages contain humorous illustrations and simple diagrams to explain the points the author makes. One could argue the book itself incorporates some of the lessons it teaches, by helping the reader easily digest the points presented; to not "make them think so hard" about the complicated and subjective process of designing a simple yet complex piece of software.

I can safely say this book is recommended for any and all software teams aiming to build software that is easily usable for all sorts of end-users. Our team found this book to be an excellent guide in constructing software that is not only useful but easy to use.

It's time to meet the folks that keep Cimetrix running - our Front Office team! Meet Joshua Castro,  a Cimetrix Staff Accountant. Read on to learn a little bit more about Joshua.

How long have you worked at Cimetrix?

I have worked at Cimetrix for over a year. This is my first job after graduating from the Masters Program at the University of Utah, and I hope to work here for much longer.

What is your role at Cimetrix?

I am a staff accountant here at Cimetrix. For the most part, I process purchase orders from customers and ship Cimetrix software to them. I am also in charge of the company’s payables and employee expense reimbursements using Mineral Tree and Certify. We have a small accounting team here at Cimetrix, so I also help with various accounting projects for the executives.

What drew you to Cimetrix originally?

I found out about the staff accountant position through the University of Utah career website. What drew me in the most was how much they are devoted to finding the right people for the company by conducting a very thorough interview process. It shows that they care for the employees, and want to make sure they find people who are the right fit for the company’s culture. The people are also very friendly, and I could tell that it feels like a family here.

What do you enjoy most about the work you do?

I like being challenged so it is always invigorating when I'm assigned to do new accounting projects. I am not being trained just to perform simple accounting tasks. Rather, the leadership are sculpting me to become a well-rounded accountant. I have been the lead as I've taken on different accounting projects, which allows me to use my accounting skills and knowledge. I feel like the company cares about my growth which encourages me to work even harder.

What do you find to be most challenging about your job?

The most challenging part about my job is juggling between the different accounting functions I am in charge of. This is especially hard during the period of the year when clients tend to send the most puchase orders. It would be easy to get overwhelmed by this, on top of my other accounting duties and deadlines. However, this has taught me to organize and prioritize my tasks so that I can complete them all on time. I keep a checklist of things I need to do for the day and the week. This helps me keep track of things I need to do, and it feels good as I check off each task from my list. These challenges have also taught me to just take a break from my work when I am feeling stressed. I take short walks outside to clear my mind, so that I am reenergized when I return back to my duties.

What are your top 3 favorite books and/or movies?

I don't have a favorite book, but I watch a lot of movies. My top 3 movies are:

1. Thank You For Your Service – This is a well-executed movie about what it is like for our military service members who have just returned home from their service. I have two family members who served in the military, and I have gained so much more respect and understanding about what they have done for our country. The movie captures a large range of emotions, and I feel for the characters in the movie.
2. A Star is Born – The directing of this movie is so well-done. I have not seen the previous versions of this movie, but this was a great storytelling of Hollywood. The soundtrack is also amazing.
3. Four Sisters & A Wedding – This is a Filipino comedy movie about four sisters who are trying to stop their younger brother from marrying a girl they do not like. I like this movie because it has a lot of my Filipino culture in it, and I have dealt with similar things with my own sisters.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I like to spend time with my 6-month old Dalmatian Radar. He used to be in a military bomb-sniffing program before we got him, but the owners decided that that was not the right route for him. We bought him from the military and are training him to become a service dog specifically for PTSD. He is currently in puppy school, and I’m also training him to do different tricks and commands. I also like to hike and travel so we usually do trips in our trailer to different hiking spots. The most recent hike is at Zion National Park where we did Angels Landing. It was a long hike but I safely crawled my way up to the top. Lastly, I play video games on my free time. I enjoy the game Overwatch, which is a fun team-based game with different characters and abilities.

Cimetrix held its annual shareholder meeting this past Friday, August 16, 2019 at our headquarters in Salt Lake City, UT. It was nice to see many familiar faces as well as some new faces. There was just one proposal voted on at the meeting to re-elect all five Directors, which was approved by shareholders with over 99% of the votes cast in favor of the proposal. Bob Reback, our President and CEO, introduced each member of Board of Directors and provided a brief history of each board member’s tenure with Cimetrix and the specific expertise and value each of them bring to Cimetrix and our shareholders. We appreciate the wisdom, hard work and direction from our talented board members as well as their commitment to fairly represent the interests of shareholders. We are thankful to our shareholders for their continued support of Management and our Board of Directors.

After the formal shareholder meeting was adjourned, Dave Faulkner, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and Alan Weber, Vice President, New Product Innovations, presented an update on industry trends, our product portfolio and growth opportunities. Following their presentation, Bob Reback, provided an update on the State-of-the-Company, including the company’s increased CAGR of 28% compared to the 6% CAGR as a public company from 2002 through 2013. Cimetrix ended the 2018 fiscal year with profitable operations, no debt, and over $3M of cash.

We continue to be thankful for the support and enthusiasm demonstrated by our shareholders, the hard work of all our employees, and the guidance from our Board of Directors. Thank you for all your contributions to Cimetrix.

Today is our next edition of the Cimetrix Book Club. Our employees are always striving to develop their skills, share information, and keep up to date with the industry. Part of this effort includes an employee book club that involves many of our team members each month. We will cover some of their favorites from time-to-time here on our blog!

Today's book is called "Microsoft Visual C# Step by Step – Eighth Edition" by John Sharp. The book review is by Richard Andrew, a Software Engineer based in Salt Lake City, UT, USA.This book was designed to be an overview of the programming language, C# and cover the breadth of most topics while delving in depth on some of the topics.  It was designed to be helpful for even the most novice developers while still being useful to advanced programmers looking to sharpen their craft.  This was perfect for our group because we had a mix of aspiring developers (or developers who hadn’t spent much time programming yet), experienced developers who were new to C#, and experienced developers just looking to get better and learn new things about the language and about best practices.

The Book was split up into four sections. The first two sections focused on general programming practices and structure that are important to any programming language but written in a way that was applicable for C#. These sections mainly focused on breadth and covering many topics. This was especially helpful for our aspiring developers and the developers who were just learning or becoming familiar with C#. For our more experienced developers, these sections were more of review or relearning what they already knew.

Section three dove deeper into more advanced programming topics and provided a good overview for some of our novice developers, but it was really geared for a more experienced developer. This section talked about generics, collections, event handling and querying expressions. Lots of new tools to add to our kits.

Section four focused primarily on building Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) with C#, and the author specifically chose to highlight using UWP applications (Universal Windows Platform). This section on the surface seemed to be less relevant to what we were working on. But after reading and looking looking at the code behind it, it became very relatable to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), which is an application we use in our products. This section was also extremely helpful for anybody seeking to become Microsoft Certified. As we currently have several engineers in our group striving to become Microsoft Certified, this section was helpful preparation. 

All in all this book was excellent for our team. It gave an introduction and an overview to our novice developers while still providing a lot of education to our more experienced developers. A great thing about this book were the examples in each section that, when we really dug in, gave us rich knowledge and context to everything the author was trying to convey. You really get out what you put into the study of this book. 

It's time to meet the folks that keep Cimetrix running - our Front Office team! Meet Jake Strong,  Cimetrix Controller. Read on to learn a little bit more about Jake.

How long have you worked at Cimetrix?

I've been at Cimetrix for 4 years and 4 months.

What is your role at Cimetrix?

Controller

What drew you to Cimetrix originally?

I was coming from a company where my role was highly specialized and I was looking to work for a company where I could have a more involved and comprehensive role in the accounting department. Cimetrix provided me with that opportunity. In addition, once I had my first interview, I was immediately drawn in by the friendliness of the admin team and impressiveness of the executive team.

What do you enjoy most about the work you do?

I really enjoy the people with whom I work. I also enjoy that my position enables me to work with all of the other departments within Cimetrix; that gives me the opportunity to work with nearly every employee and to be involved with all aspects of the company.

What do you find to be most challenging about your job?

A result of working in a role that touches so many other parts of the company is that I frequently come up against projects that are unrelated to any of my previous work experience. However, this has enabled me to gain a lot of valuable exposure to areas beyond just accounting and to develop critical thinking and research skills that will serve me in all of my professional life.  

What are your top 3 favorite books and/or movies?

Ever since streaming TV took off I have been watching fewer and fewer movies. So, I’ll give you my top 3 TV series: Seinfeld, Game of Thrones and VEEP.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I like to be outdoors as much as possible. During the summer I spend a lot of time at the pool or paddle boarding at the lake with my wife and 3 kids. We also like to camp, hike and explore all of the amazing state and national parks that Utah has to offer; in the winter I snowboard while I wait for summer to start again. I also like to gather around good food and sporting events with my family and friends.

Today we are introducing the Cimetrix Book Club on our blog. Our employees are always striving to develop their skills, share information, and keep up to date with the industry. Part of this effort includes an employee book club that involves many of our team members each month. We will cover some of their favorites from time-to-time here on our blog!

Today's book is called "Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams" by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, two of the industry’s most experienced agile testing practitioners and consultants. The book review is by Morgan Kap, a QE Engineer based in Salt Lake City, UT, USA.This book on agile testing is a great high-level explanation of how testing fits into an agile development team. The focus of this book is on how to successfully transition a team to an agile methodology, or to create a new QE/testing team in an agile methodology. While our team was already practicing agile before we read the book, it had quite a bit of valuable knowledge that led our team to make changes in how we tackle daily testing tasks.

One of the main changes we made immediately was to slightly restructure our team, and we have become a more effective team as a result. This book on Agile Testing is full of real-world stories of testing success and failures. These stories show the importance of techniques and tools, outlined for easy understanding in the book, for developing an efficient and complete testing process.

Some of the major focus points include being test driven during development and the many benefits this can create for all types of projects. Another focus details the many ways a software product should be tested; from security to usability. There is even a chapter focusing on how an office’s culture can have an impact on testing. This topic led to our team to try a few new things to make our culture more fun and interesting. This now includes having rubber ducks on every desk - that's a long-story, but we love it.

Overall, "Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams" by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, is a great starting point for those quality engineering teams that searching for ideas and way to improve and understand many of the important aspects of testing software.