Integrating engineering and manufacturing in the semiconductor industry

Summary form only given. This paper identifies major organizational obstacles that impede integration. Data from interviews with 63 individuals from five sites highlight problems in five major realms: boundary control, status, teams, communication, and rewards. Accountability and responsibility are blurred across departments, resulting in problems of boundary control. For example, equipment ownership is often murky, leading to disputes between engineers and maintenance personnel. Status differences among engineering groups set R&D engineers above their manufacturing counterparts and make it difficult to convince engineers to tackle pressing manufacturing problems. Cross-functional teams suffer from status differences among members as well as ill-defined member roles; engineers frequently complain about the strong positions occupied by marketing representatives on the teams. Communications problems arise from the amount, content, and delivery of information shared between departments, leaving engineers with little time to think and production operators with instructions they have no time to read. A misalignment between rewards and goals causes incentive problems throughout the organization. Solutions to these problems will require a combination of procedural, organizational, and infrastructural changes, as well as an expanded view of the concurrent engineering paradigm