eDiagnostics
- Knowledge sharing to improve maintenance efficiency in a semiconductor manufacturing plant
An XpertRule Case Study by Lu Qin of NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
MANUFACTURING (SINGAPORE) PTE LTD - May 2003.
Recurrent equipment breakdowns and the lack of knowledge sharing
among our technical staff are the primary reason why we considered
building an expert system. Often, equipment breakdowns encountered
everyday in our semiconductor manufacturing plant are due to the
fact that our technical personnel administered the wrong corrective
action, hence the problem reappeared until the right repair action
had been taken.
Lack in knowledge sharing created the differences in the level
of repair proficiency amongst our technical staff. Without knowledge
sharing, how many times would a similar problem have to surface
before all our technical staff has experience in dealing with it?
Reinventing the wheel every time is not exactly efficient in today’s
competitive market.
With this objective, we started an initial project called "eDiagnostics",
to model all our company’s senior technicians’ machine
troubleshooting experience and generate a systematic way of troubleshooting
equipments using decision trees and rules methods. We wanted to
be able to transfer all the knowledge onto a centralized database
to allow users to tap into this knowledge base and also add in new
knowledge without much hassle. Our senior equipment engineer evaluated
XpertRule and found that it fitted our requirements for this project,
hence XpertRule was chosen as our primary software platform.
The initial prototype was done relatively effortlessly, thanks
to the highly graphical windows based system that allows the programmer
in charge of the project to complete the prototype in a minimum
time. Being a windows based application allowed the first time users
to quickly familiarize themselves to the basic navigational process.
The online manual was a major plus as it was written concisely and
there were examples included.
Using it was a breeze for the programmer and certain commands that
were rather difficult to use in other higher level programming languages,
such as C or C++, could be done almost effortlessly in XpertRule.
As we wanted to transfer our knowledge base into a centralized database,
accessing the database becomes a very important step when running
the application. XpertRule provided easy to use syntax that made
assessing the database a simpler procedure that it really is.
The prototype was put to test and the team was tasked to evaluate
the system in terms of its ability to direct the users to the correct
result based on the questions that the system asked of the user.
The team carried out the system evaluation for a period of 2 weeks
and found that on average it directed the users to the correct result
approximately 80% of the time, and other metrics showed that the
number of recurrent equipment downs reduced.
Users thought that the system was easy to use and that the systematic
approach is basically good as it gives them ideas as to what to
look out for when they encounter a similar problem during their
course of work.
With the initial project deemed a success, we are already working
to extend the scope of the knowledge to cover more equipment down
codes and more accurate troubleshooting procedures.
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