Lean advanced equipment supplier training

In December 2008, facing a severe worldwide recession, a key strategy by senior Intel corporation management was reducing discretionary and wasteful spending by 50%. One of the largest discretionary spending categories is the cost of technical training provided by our equipment suppliers and the travel associated with sending senior equipment maintenance technicians and equipment engineers to lengthy training classes at locations around the world. A side effect of travel was that our most senior people would lose approximately 3 days of work time for travel before and after training. The challenge was meeting this aggressive cost reduction goal while maintaining high quality training and low production risk. We had two key opportunities. The first was available equipment capacity on our manufacturing floors, and second, we had motivated factory managers who challenged our training organization to create Lean and effective, affordable training. In 2009, the team deployed a pilot, transferred the key learning's to define and deploy the business process, systems, logistics, roles and collaterals to go from <;10% to over 90% of advanced training onsite. The solution was deployed at all the AT sites in one year providing factories with proven capability to maintain proficient workforce, reduce supplier dependence, maintain IP and lower POR costs.