Welcome to Volume 24, Number 2 of the FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter. In this issue, we have an exciting staffing update about the promotion of Lara Nichols to become FabTime’s President. We also have an announcement about our recent collaborative case study with Flexciton at the Fab Owners Alliance meeting, as well as the usual updates from Jennifer’s LinkedIn. Our software tip of the month includes two ways of measuring the duration of downtime events, following up on a tip from the last issue.
We have a plethora of subscriber discussion in this issue, including calculating theoretical cycle time, X-Factor, and the value of a day’s worth of cycle time, as well as managing bottlenecks. Our final subscriber question, about managing a process sequence with time constraints between steps inspired us to make time constrained processing the topic of this issue’s main article. Jennifer studied time constrained systems for her PhD research and has been remiss in not delving into this complex topic sooner. She discusses capacity planning methods for time constrained systems, then moves on to operational issues, and closes with a few recommendations for coping with time constraints in practice. As always, we welcome your feedback
Welcome to Volume 24, Number 1 of the FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter. In this issue, we have an announcement about a case study that we’ll be presenting at the Fab Owners Alliance next week, an update about our efforts to change the platform that we use to send the newsletter, and an announcement about new training and informational materials for software customers. Our software tip of the month is about using the newly modified Dynamic X-Factor chart in FabTime. We have subscriber discussion about the best way to share alerts, how to identify bottlenecks in the fab, and whether to set a lower bound on the number of hot lots.
Our main article this month was inspired by the positive response that we’ve received to our new cycle time improvement tip emails. We shared a list of ten recommendations for improving fab cycle time two years ago, and today we introduce ten additional recommendations. While not all these recommendations will be relevant for all readers, we hope that each of you finds something useful in the discussion. If you have additional tips for improving fab cycle time, we would love to compile and share those in the future.
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