Productivity improvement driven by an integrated manufacturing system

An integrated manufacturing system is under development in the AT&T Madrid plant. It has three basic modules: planning, execution, and measurement/analysis and corrective actions. The planning module uses engineering standards to calculate the resources needed for any business requirement. At the same time it calculates the utilization required and the cycle time goals for all the work centers, allowing an optimization of the trade-off utilization (cost)/cycle time. The same engineering standards and planning factors (number of machines, etc.) feed the execution module. The core of this module is a scheduler which manages the product flow, assigning the work per shift and facility type. The production rates are calculated taking into consideration commitments to the customers, current machine status, inventory availability, engineering standards and the inventory managing rules obtained by the experience or simulation. The third module compares current cycle times per work center with the values assigned by the cycle time model. The major discrepancies are traced back to engineering standards not achieved. When a capacity increase is planned, future problems can be forecasted by the comparison between the percent utilization of available time obtained in the capacity model with the standards and with the current values of the same parameters. All the major issues trigger corrective action plans. These are tracked until they disappear. The first 21 weeks of use of the Integrated Manufacturing system has driven a cycle time improvement of 20% (see chart II) and, at the same time, the wafers started were increased by 18%.