On-time delivery improvement at a semiconductor equipment manufacturing facility : developing robust work plan to improve resources utilization and shorten production cycle time/

Abstract

The boost of the need in semiconductor equipment has brought Varian, a giant in semiconductor manufacturer an increasing demand period. Unsatisfactory on-time delivery in the subassembly production in SMKT, however, has gradually become a critical issue that prevents the production from operating smoothly and efficiently as well as resulting in significant amount of extra financial costs. While the SMKT ontime delivery is generally improved from the two aspects, the material shortage issue and the capacity and priority issue, the second approach was focused, analyzed and well resolved in this thesis. Capacity analysis indicates that more manpower is needed to fulfill the production demand, and an analysis tool based on Excel was created to help with capacity management and planning in a long term. A series of matching algorithms was designed to solve the prioritization issue by providing efficient work plans that direct the production in SMKT assembly process, improving the SMKT on-time delivery by 10-20% and shortening the shop order cycle time in assembly process by one day. Moreover, recommendations on data utilization, capacity management and resources management in SMKT are provided accordingly to optimize the SMKT production to be more proficient and well-organized, which will greatly benefit Varian in the long term. The implementation of this algorithm generates no financial cost except for increasing the assembler's capacity, which indicates that all solutions provided in this thesis are economic and effective at the same time.