The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing - Part 2
13 August 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In this part of The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing, an article that you can find at the IEEE Spectrum site, I mean to look at the specific claims and experiences that the authors of the article had in their TPS consulting journey at the unnamed IDM. The following are the four specific "distilled" rules (that earlier Harvard researchers have conducted research on - Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. My own foray into this matter is in this review - Toyota, Toyota… Part 2)
Spear and Bowen distilled TPS into four rules, which in summary are
(1) highly specify activities [Rule 1: All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing, and outcome.]
(2) clearly define the transfer of material and information [Rule 2: Every customer-supplier connection must be direct, and there must be an unambiguous yes-or-noway to send requests and receive responses.]
(3) keep the pathway for every product and service simple and direct [Rule 3: The pathway for every product and service must be simple and direct.]
(4) detect and solve problems where and when they happen, using the scientific method. [Rule 4: Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization.]
It isn’t in the least surprising to me that the authors noted the following response from the client (and I’ve no doubt that the same sentiment would have been echoed in various forms at various levels of the firm and in many firms as well),
When we present these rules, even in their fully detailed form, clients generally protest that they “do it that way already.” But on closer examination-while auditing their fabs - we often find something quite different…
The problem with the four rules listed above is that they’re rather simple - actually, too simple. These kinds of rules are often taken for granted by everyone - "Isn’t that why you go to school?" or "You were trained on the job to do precisely this, right?" or "This is the way we do things…" And too often the answer is just assumed by management and everyone else to be - "Yes" when the real answer is - "I don’t know", not even "No". What part of a manager’s activity - say: Team building, strategic planning, tactical planning, budgeting etc does the above fall under? In my own personal experience, I’ve come across several management chains and not one of them even take the pains to instill (and consequently follow up) these four simple rules. It is as if, we all know what work constitutes - don’t we?
Do we?
The authors follow up with a description of the variances they observed with respect to the four rules above. If you look at the four rules above, they can be divided into two broad classes - the first three in one class and the last rule by itself in another class. The first three rules deal with minimization of variance from expected activity/reduction of uncertainty in some manner while the fourth describes a philosophy and directive of detecting and solving problems.
The following examples from the article Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System are illustrative of the importance that these rules are given, first in the specific sense and second in the sense of summary:
The requirement that people respond to supply requests within a specific time frame further reduces the possibility of variance. That is especially true in service requests. A worker encountering a problem is expected to ask for assistance at once. The designated assistant is then expected to respond immediately and resolve the problem within the worker’s cycle time. If the worker is installing a front seat every 55 seconds, say, then a request for help must be answered and dealt with in less than the 55 seconds.If the problem cannot be resolved in less than 55 seconds, that failure immediately challenges the hypotheses in this customer-supplier connection for assistance. Perhaps the request signal is ambiguous. Perhaps the designated assistant has too many other requests for help and is busy or is not a capable problem solver. Constantly testing the hypotheses in this way keeps the system flexible, making it possible to adjust the system continually and constructively.
Yikes!! That’s a tough one. Embedded in the above statement (regardless of the magnitude of time specified for the response time) is the assumption that there is a well trained and qualified link between operators and engineers and up that chain. Also, that this knowledge is indeed maintained and transmitted through the ups and downs of the semiconductor economic/business cycle (or for that matter in any industry and its operational business cycles) - which is a rather stringent requirement. Further more in contrast to existing exhortation that one often finds,
The striking thing about the requirement to ask for help at once is that it is often counter intuitive to managers who are accustomed to encouraging workers to try to resolve problems on their own before calling for help. But then problems remain hidden and are neither shared nor resolved company wide.The situation is made worse if workers begin to solve problems themselves and then arbitrarily decide when the problem is big enough to warrant a call for help. Problems mount up and only get solved much later, by which time valuable information about the real causes of the problem may have been lost.To understand Toyota’s success, you have to unravel the paradox - you have to see that the rigid specification is the very thing that makes the flexibility and creativity possible.
However, much of this way of running a business (or effectively the business of "culture") at Toyota was not the resultant of a new initiative launched top-down or bottom-up. Instead, it seems to have aggregated, pruned and adapted over the last 5 decades. In other words, while commitment from all levels of a firm is a necessary condition to seeing a transformational process succeed, it is a matter more of endurance than getting it right at the get go. While it might be safe to say that the elimination of waste functions as the overarching purpose at Toyota:
Toyota does not consider any of the tools or practices-such as kanbans or andon cords, which so many outsiders have observed and copied- as fundamental to the Toyota Production System. Toyota uses them merely as temporary responses to specific problems that will serve until abetter approach is found or conditions change. They’re referred to as “countermeasures,” rather than “solutions,” because that would imply a permanent resolution to a problem.
No kidding!!
So given that these are the sort of themes, directives/rules, engagement and internal culture that constitute some of the cogs of TPS - how has this particular tool - FPO solves some of the problems that were anecdotally reported w.r.t to the elucidation of the rules by the authors of this article.
I’ll leave you with two thoughts, one of them from Taiichi Ohno which is amongst my favorites: "Costs do not exist to be calculated. Costs exist to be reduced." And from my year of working in a wafer fab, I have begun to think that, "Automation is a boon and a bane for the same reason. It automates the things that you do well. Unfortunately, it automates the things that you don’t do too well also."
Tags: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Lean within Semiconductor Manufacturing, WIP in a wafer fab, Toyota Production System, Lean at Toyota, Automation
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