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INTRODUCTION

It's a brave new world in Intel manufacturing. Shrinking product and technology lifecycles, pricing pressures, supply line and segment management requirements, increased manufacturing complexity, and the impact of emerging e-Business are just some of the new challenges for Intel's back-end components manufacturing groups. Coupled with a geographically dispersed, 17 time zone non-stop Virtual Factory¹ operation, the need for breakthrough management strategies becomes imperative. The following questions are posed:

• How does manufacturing become more responsive to customer delivery, flexibility, and cost needs?

• How do we transfer and ramp products faster with low variability?

• How do we reduce cycle time to World Class, and static inventories to zero?

• How do we proactively and dynamically allocate production capacity?

In the Technology Manufacturing Group's (TMG) Assembly Test Manufacturing (ATM) organization, these challenges are being addressed through a variety of initiatives such as supply chain management; better forward planning; asset fungibility and utilization improvements; and people, team, and system resources.

To enable many of these initiatives, Information Technology needs to be exploited. Assembly Test Manufacturing Information Systems (ATMis) is one of the programs chartered to deliver the necessary enablers. The ATMis mission is to facilitate manufacturing performance breakthroughs by developing and delivering three key capabilities:

• Business operations and planning data to run factory operations, solve problems, and make decisions faster.

• Real-time and asynchronous collaboration to improve virtual work team efficiencies, and to mitigate work-team burnout.

• A virtual information and knowledge environment to enable intra- and inter-organization sharing and reuse.

In this paper, we discuss one of these tools developed by ATMis, the ATM Cockpit. The goal of the Cockpit team is to promote more effective use of ATM resources and assets as follows:

• Deliver management-level data and information needed to run VF manufacturing and supply line operations.

• Reduce time and overhead costs to obtain this information.

• Provide tools and services in half the typical development time at minimum new cost and Cost Of Ownership (COO).

The Cockpit was designed to support three ATM customer segments: the ATM/TMG executive team, the ATM operations management team, and the VF Technology management team. Its specific deliverables are as follows:

• Put factory and supply-line historical status and look-ahead information from a variety of disparate domains at the consumer's fingertips.

• Provide a potential problem alert and notification utility.

These deliverables are provided by way of features such as data drill-down and graphical display, a personalization utility, and an easy to use Web-based front-end.

A technical core team was assembled to drive the program and work with IT and company data providers to create a standards-based architecture and technical framework. The team employed a small group of key customer stakeholders to guide implementation, utilized rapid application development and deployment (RADD) techniques to fast-track development, and employed software already licensed by Intel to create and deploy the product in time. Using an add value, ease the pain now deliverables approach, the team produced and deployed the pilot product in six months; subsequent updates were done in 90-day cycles. Since data is crucial to customer decision making, significant effort was paid to modeling and validation of source data. The tool is currently employed in ATM OLGA²/Flip Chip Virtual Factories and in ATM operations management.