Systems level approach to process improvement initiatives in a semiconductor manufacturing environment

Many successful companies have difficulty implementing large-scale change initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, outsourcing or Advanced Process Control. This can often be due to the fact that they treat large-scale improvement efforts in the same way that they handle smaller improvement efforts. Instead the author suggests that companies should take a more systemic approach to implementing large-scale improvement efforts and handle them differently from other improvement efforts. The suggested systemic approach involves four major aspects. The first aspect is to subdivide the initiative into smaller more manageable phases. The next aspect is to analyze each of the individual steps independent of each other. From there the change agent should examine the interdependencies between different steps and assess the systemic relationships of the initiative. Finally the approach suggests ways to look at the financial impact of the large-scale effort and ways to ease its implementation. Specifically the research focused on a Fab-Wide Process Control improvement initiative at Intel's Fab 18 in Qiryat-Gat, Israel.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Ruddick, Todd Andon

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Donald Rosenfield, Roy Welsch and Deborah Nightingale.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.
• Sloan School of Management.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35588

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35588