Equipment automation is specialist work. Every tool has its own habits: the events it reports, the order it reports them in, the ways it fails. That knowledge is learned on the floor, one tool at a time, and fewer engineers carry it every year.
Our engineers have spent their careers writing and supporting the interfaces between production tools and the hosts that run them. Some of those interfaces have run for decades without being replaced.
Outpost is how we package that experience. It lets us connect a new tool quickly, prove it before it goes near production, and hand it over to a customer who then owns it.