Transforming Intel factories from global presence to global operation!

The collective output of multiple high volume factories located around the world has enabled Intel to satisfy the enormous demand requirements of customers worldwide. The global operation concept transforms this cooperation barrier into a strategic advantage by sharing resources to improve engineering support of Intel's global manufacturing operation. The concept capitalizes on e-manufacturing concepts and Intel's "copy exactly methodology", which ensure that factories have virtually identical infrastructure. Downtime events that require engineering support can be handled by engineering support from any of Intel identical factories. Downtime incidents are automatically routed to the appropriate engineer worldwide. It also gives them the ability to remotely access and control tools from other factories. This technology allows virtually any issue that requires engineering support to be solved remotely. Typically, to reduce the potential downtime impact, downtime events are handled by engineers on-call. The concept is being expanded into many different engineering functions and among additional factories to further increase the hours of on-site engineering coverage. This paper describes the benefits and challenges involved with implementing this concept at Intel.