Early Success with Factory Dashboard at MACOM

Daniel Lenski – Senior Site Lead, INFICON, Portland OR

MACOM Project Overview

The FPS Factory Dashboard provides a concise view of factory operations in real time. From the Factory Dashboard, anyone in operations, maintenance, or engineering will know where to focus their efforts at any given time for optimal factory productivity.

A large part of the value of the FPS Factory Dashboard (Figure 1) deployment comes from the preparation of the FPS Data Warehouse. The Data Warehouse (Figure 2) is the engine that integrates factory data sources into one common platform for use by the Factory Dashboard. During the data preparation and integration phase, factory personnel are asked to think critically about:

How data is used in their factory.
What gaps exist in the data.
How the data might be better organized for analysis and prediction.

The recent deployment at MACOM illustrates how reconfiguring factory data can improve performance.
For more information, visit FPS Factory Dashboard and FPS Data Warehouse.

Figure 1: The FPS Factory Dashboard operations tab showing WIP metrics by module, priority, and line.

Figure 2: The FPS Data Warehouse and its applications provide new ways to analyze and visualize factory performance.

Early Project Challenges

Like many semiconductor manufacturers, MACOM's facilities, product lines, and factory systems are assembled from several decades' worth of mergers and consolidations. An early challenge in the project has been to structure the data from MACOM's complex and varied manufacturing processes.

Data Warehouse goes Online

MACOM's resourcefulness and openness to new practices, combined with INFICON's experience in complex factories, has changed the data landscape. Rapid construction of new data structures for equipment categorization, WIP, and physical layout, minimized historical constraints with the goal of understanding factory operations as clearly as possible.

For example, two product lines process WIP using the same model of photo stepper. Stepper 1 was categorized differently than Stepper 2. In practice, these two tools can be used interchangeably. However, because of the rigid categorization based on historical practice, the legacy system could not accurately compare the two tools' availability or utilization. Now that INFICON has categorized tools in terms of interchangeable functionality and physical location in the factory, MACOM's equipment and planning teams can easily compare the two tools and manage them as a shared operational resource.

Factory Dashboard is up and Running

The reorganization of factory data in the FPS Data Warehouse is paying off quickly. Managers at MACOM now have access to a Factory Dashboard that updates in real-time and makes it easy to understand how a particular tool or lot relates to the overall health of the factory and all operational areas. Figure 3 shows a Factory Dashboard Priority lots page identifying the categories of priority lots. This is followed by a list of Gantt charts with an estimation of the cycle time for each lot at upcoming steps.

Figure 3: FPS Factory Dashboard Priority lots page identifying the category and next steps for each type of priority lot.

Summary and Future Integration with NextMove

MACOM now has Factory Dashboard available for their entire factory. They can accurately determine tool availability and utilization, as well as inventory and moves levels across all product lines.

MACOM and INFICON will continue to organize the underlying factory data for use in FPS NextMove to optimize WIP deliveries in the factory. Critical bottleneck areas will benefit from knowing exactly where lots are located and where they need to be delivered.