Enabling remote operations and cycle time reduction via automated lot-equipment assignments

Factory managers have expressed the vision that consolidating all the operations management of a fab in a central location greatly facilitates control and coordination and lead to a significant improvement in factory performance and overall productivity. Within Intel, this vision is referred to as the remote operational command center or the ROC. The ROC vision of operations management rests partially upon a roadmap of progressive automation of material handling operations. The next step on the material handling roadmap called for automating complex what-next and where-next decisions associated with ordering and processing production material so that manufacturing technicians and shift managers can manage the fab unencumbered by the rote activity associated with manual production operations. Automating lot-equipment assignments allows the manufacturing organization to focus technician resources on more complex and specialized fab operations while managing standard operations "by exception" - an essential feature of the ROC. The intent of this paper is to describe our progress on that roadmap and the observed results from the implementation