Transforming Intel factories from global presence to global operation!

摘要

The collective output of multiple high volume factories located around the world has enabled Intel to satisfy the enormous demand requirements of customers worldwide. Despite this excellent strategic advantage, the time zone and workday differences have largely hindered cross-factory cooperation at the operational level. The Global Operation concept transforms this cooperation barrier into a strategic advantage by sharing resources to improve engineering support of Intel's global manufacturing operation. Since Intel has factories positioned around the globe, engineering support follows the sun, greatly reducing the number of hours when engineering support is not available at Intel. Engineers normally charted to ensure uptime at a local factory are now ensuring uptime across Intel factories worldwide. Night and weekend events that would normally wait until the next business day for resolution, are now being solved immediately by an on-site engineer at a sister factory on the other side of the world. The Global Operation concept capitalizes on E-Manufacturing concepts and Intel's "Copy Exactly Methodology," which ensure that factories have virtually identical infrastructure. Downtime events that require engineering support can be handled by engineering support from any of Intel's identical factories. Downtime incidents are automatically routed to the appropriate engineer worldwide. It also gives them the ability to remotely access and control tools from other factories. This technology allows virtually any issue that requires engineering support to be solved remotely. A downtime event includes any event that impacts the output of the factory including those related to equipment, process, yield, software and hardware. Typically, to reduce the potential downtime impact, downtime events are handled by engineers on-call. While this approach is usually effective, it can also be a significant burden on engineers resulting in excessive attrition. This is a significant concern since the retention of these key contributors is a high priority Global Operations concept helps to alleviate this burden by reducing the number of hours on-call engineers need to handle downtime events. Other benefits include redundant sets of specialized engineers and improved synergy among factories. The concept is being expanded into many different engineering functions and among additional factories to further increase the hours of on-site engineering coverage. Intel has shown that engineers can effectively resolve manufacturing downtime events in other factories using the Global Operations concept. This paper describes the benefits and challenges involved with implementing this concept at Intel.