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Application of OM&S Technology

The following are examples of how OM&S technology can be applied:

• Comparison of Continuous Flow Manufacturing (CFM) to current Functional Flow Manufacturing practices in the production of Single Edge Connector Cartridge (SECc) modules may be applicable to other manufacturing facilities.
• Dedication of particular stepper lenses to particular lots in fabs to improve overall factory performance.
• Increase in WIP turns using full factory simulation to enhance use of information to improve performance.
• Evaluation of the effects of lot size on factory performance to determine optimum lot size.
• Evaluation of the effects of modifying operational policies on scheduling use of factory equipment to increase utilization without adding more equipment.

More detailed discussions of applications of operational modeling may be found in Court Hilton's paper entitled "Manufacturing Operations System Design and Analysis" and Karl Kempf's paper "Improving Throughput Across the Factory Life-Cycle" also appearing in this Q4'98 issue of the Intel Technology Journal.

Note that all of the above examples are specific applications; they do something for someone who has a specific issue to resolve. As such, they are highly beneficial. But the real payoff comes when all these applications are linked through some integrated, hierarchical model. The benefits of such a model can be imagined by comparing it to Microsoft Windows*. In Microsoft Windows, each application (Word*, Excel*, PowerPoint*, etc.) is individually very useful, but the ability to share textual and image objects between applications greatly enhances the whole. The total Windows environment is more than just the sum of its parts.

So part of the evolving OM&S effort is aimed at defining a modeling hierarchy, and establishing the links and infrastructure between modeling elements, to make the entire modeling environment much more than the sum of the individual components. This is schematically illustrated in Figure 4, where the NOW environment shows individual models, distributed through the manufacturing enterprise, and the FUTURE scenario shows an evenly distributed, linked hierarchy of models.

The scope of operational modeling is very broad, as illustrated in Figure 5. For convenience, the operational environment has been divided into three roughly equal domains: those dealing directly with product (the PHYSICAL DOMAIN), those dealing with the data and information associated both with the product and with the factory itself (the INFORMATION DOMAIN), and those dealing with background and support issues (the INFRASTRUCTURE DOMAIN). Each of these domains is itself sub-categorized, as shown in Figure 5.

Each sub-category is made up of sub-sub-categories, and so on, until one reaches the lowest level of the model hierarchy. Hence, each topic can have applications, roadmaps, goals, interfaces, etc.; the question is, how many of these topics have common elements and should actually be integrated with one another. This integration is both lateral, meaning across equivalent levels of hierarchy, as well as being up and down the chain of model hierarchy. It raises interesting philosophical questions about model integration, as well as deep practical questions of how one may make modeling capabilities more cost-effective and efficient.

^* Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners.


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