Effective maintenance strategy to improve performance through RCM concept

Semiconductor industries has evolved over the years not only in technology front, but also on cost competitiveness, faster cycle time, operational efficiencies. Semiconductor industry has adapted many strategies like, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Six Sigma quality, lean manufacturing and many more. In general, industry responded well to the market changes by adopting these strategies to meet the ever demanding challenges of different sectors like computing, communication, consumer electronics and etc. However, in the recent years, use of electronic components in automotive and medical industry has changed the semiconductor landscape significantly and pushed the limits further on product reliability, which further challenges semiconductor industry to look beyond the conventional manufacturing process and controls. Tighter process controls, change management system, etc. became prime focus items to entertain stringent industry requirement. Even though these activities helped to improve or prevent quality spills but there are still reported, which prompted to look into every aspect of manufacturing process. Since the process and methods are built around equipment, now became the area of focus to look into the existing maintenance methodologies. Comparison done with other industries to assess the similarities and gaps in maintenance system and interesting maintenance strategy and results are observed in airline industry, which has one of the best and proven track records for safety and reliability. This prompted us to look into the maintenance strategy that ensure aircraft is always safe and reliable, which heavily utilize concept called Reliability Centered Maintenance or in short RCM. The fundamental difference between the conventional maintenance versus the RCM approach is that in RCM, activities are done to ensure the machine or an asset continues to do what is supposed to do rather than doing maintenance activities to prevent it from going down. RCM uses a very structured way of identifying critical part and to establish appropriate methodology to ensure the performance standards This paper explains concept RCM methodology is being used in semiconductor manufacturing industry to improve equipment performance (reduction of downtime).