Manufacturing scrap reduction team

In today's highly competitive: marketplace, working better, smarter, and more cost effectively is essential. The scrap created during manufacturing can either sharpen or diminish a company's competitive edge. Customers require that their orders be delivered on time with yield quality that either meets or exceeds specifications. In Hot Process, scrap and hold lots were becoming a very serious problem that affected the manufacturing team's performance, customers orders, and delivery schedule. To alleviate this problem, each project was directed to address its part of this critical defect issue. The Hot Process project with manufacturing production control, acting as an empowered self-directed group, formed a market-driven team for scrap which could help improve production yields and reduce defects. Issues identified by the team included the lack of a unified procedure for documenting scrap, wafer-handling concerns suggested by new and experienced operators, and how best to focus on single wafer scrap and the cause of that scrap, and its correction or prevention. This paper describes the team's plan (or unified assault) to increase yields by reducing defects and how a common accounting procedure was implemented to review existing departmental practices which could result in a common scrap procedure. Also addressed are the several wafer-handling issues which resulted in revised wafer-handling class that more adequately reflects the nature of today's defects and enhances operator understanding of the the underlying costs associated with how scrap affects yield. Finally, this paper discusses the measurement and reporting of our Hot Process scrap team's yield improvements and defect reductions at bimonthly meetings with management.