FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter Abstracts

FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter Abstracts - Volume 19 (5 issues)


Tips for Sending More Productive Emails (Issue 19.05)

Welcome to Volume 19, Number 5 of the FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter. We hope that those of you in the US had a relaxing Thanksgiving holiday and we wish everyone a joyful holiday season and a happy and productive 2019. March will mark the 20th anniversary of FabTime as a company, and we are grateful for all of the colleagues, customers, newsletter subscribers and friends that we've made over that time.

In this final newsletter issue of the year, we have an announcement regarding our successful OEE webinar. Our FabTime tip of the month is about using a new feature to rotate charts by 90 degrees. We have one response to our previous issue’s main article about the proposed metric delta to moves goals. Our new main article contains tips for sending more productive emails, inspired by some discussion at the October Fab Owners Alliance meeting. We welcome your feedback and thank you for reading, as always.


A Possible Metric Regarding Delta to Moves Goal: Updated (Issue 19.04)

Welcome to Volume 19, Number 4 of the FabTime cycle time management newsletter. In this issue we have an announcement about a new FabTime webinar on OEE that we will be hosting in late October. (Sorry, the webinar is for software customers only.) Our FabTime software tip of the month is about identifying tools that have been defined as batch tools in FabTime and looking at their performance. In our main article, we explore possibilities for a new metric that captures variation from move goals (by fab, area, or tool group) over time. The idea behind the metric is to reduce variability by meeting moves goals more consistently from day to day.


Cycle Time and Hot Lots: Updated (Issue 19.03)

Welcome to Volume 19, Number 3 of the FabTime cycle time management newsletter. We have in our community news section an abstract from a recent conference regarding the development of a new set of semiconductor testbed datasets. Our software tip of the month is about tracking the percentage of hot lots in your fab using FabTime’s Excel export functionality.

We have no subscriber discussion at this time. However, our main article was inspired by a subscriber asking if we had ever written about hot lots. We had done so, but not for more than a dozen years, and we felt that the topic was due for an update. We have extended our previous discussion about the impact of hot lots on cycle time, adding some recent research as well as new discussion regarding metrics and the impact of hot lots on fab capacity.


Using Trendlines to Improve Fab Performance (Issue 19.02)

Welcome to Volume 19, No. 2 of the FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter. In this issue we have community announcements including a call for papers for the e-Manufacturing & Design Collaboration Symposium and about the next Fab Owners Alliance meeting. We have no subscriber discussion at this time (though we do welcome your questions and feedback).

In our tip of the month for this issue we discuss how to add a trendline to any FabTime chart. In our main article we address the use of trendlines more generally for fab performance improvement. We include examples of charts for which trendlines might be particularly useful, and discussions about the value of linear vs. more complex trendlines for day to day performance analysis. Our thanks to members of the FabTime User Group for suggesting trendlines as a topic.


Determining Availability Targets (Issue 19.01)

Welcome to Volume 19, Number 1 of FabTime’s Cycle Time Management Newsletter. We hope that everyone had a happy holiday season, and that you are all successfully fending off winter ailments. In this issue of the newsletter we have an announcement about a FabTime webinar that was held in January (and is available for viewing by FabTime customers). We have a subscriber discussion question about hot lots. Our FabTime software tip of the month is about adding a new chart series on the right-hand Y-axis when customizing charts.

In our main article this month, written with Hani Ofeck from Tower Semiconductor, we explore the setting of availability targets. While availability is an important and widely tracked metric in fabs, there is surprisingly little literature regarding the calculation and implementation of availability targets. In our article we share some general thoughts as well as implementation ideas. It is our hope that this will spur further discussion, such that we, the FabTime newsletter community, can improve our collective understanding in this area.