Question: The improved yield discussed in Example came as a result of improving the chip production process. Material waste and the staff necessary to run the facility were reduced. What motivation do engineers have to improve processes if improvement might lead to their own layoff? Discuss the issues this matter raises.
Example: Process Improvement in a Clean Room. One of the authors of this text once toured a "clean room" at a division of a large electronics manufacturer. Integrated circuit (IC) chips critical to the production of the division's most important product were made in the room, and it was the bottleneck of the whole production process for that product. Initial experience with that (very expensive) facility included 14 % yields of good IC chips, with over 80 people working there trying to produce the precious components. Early efforts at quality assurance for these chips centered on final testing and sorting good ones from bad. But it was soon clear that those efforts alone would not produce yields adequate to supply the numbers of chips needed for the end product. So a project team went to work on improving the production process. The team found that by carefully controlling the quality of some incoming raw materials, adjusting some process variables, and making measurements on wafers of chips early in the process (aimed at identifying and culling ones that would almost certainly in the end consist primarily of bad chips), the process could be made much more efficient. At the time of the tour, process-improvement efforts had raised yields to 65 % (effectively quadrupling production capacity with no capital expenditure!), drastically reduced material waste, and cut the staff necessary to run the facility from the original 80 to only eight technicians. Process-oriented efforts are what enabled this success story. No amount of attention to the yield of the process as it was originally running would have produced these important results.