Break Paradigm to Achieve Best in Class Cycle Time at High Mix Factory

NCO7 factory which is the most complex factory in ATM had been struggling with CT (cycle time) performance that hovering around 14 days in Q1’09 while achieving less than 6 days CT goal has been viewed as “myth”. With a high mix low volume (HMLV) environment, NCO7 has more products running average 20 products weekly and 40 line items versus other VF which only run 6 or lesser products. This high mix environment posed various products dependent module constraint and increased conversion complexity in the whole pipeline. High frequency of tools conversion with average 10 times per shift based on multiple factors such as build schedule and customer backlog further burden to CT performance. At the same time, NCO7 serve as NPI power house with several new products introduced and transferred from Cavite such as FC4 CPU technology. Many products have their own uniqueness like halogen free, test on ball, fuse-to-order, multi bin/sku that further complicated the environment. This involved learning curve to stabilize in term of process and product maturity.

The factory seized on its recent learning of Lean Manufacturing to enable breakthroughs, solving difficult problems and turning wild-ideas into reality. Conventional method of CONWIP control was not as effective and required engineering mechanism to drive for improvement. Team applied science methodology to determine about lot aged and transition into P90 formula calculation. This was enabling effective CT mechanism that allows factory to breakdown its highly complicated CT profile into simple and systematic manner as such streamline die kitting planning. Team explored ways to innovate and optimized the testers to run in different configurations, making it more flexible to produce different items and leveraging automation breakthrough solution such as Lot CT dispatching and COS (Constraint Optimization Solver) for effective lot level CT management and intelligent WIP planning. Lot CT dispatching tool was using