Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Productivity and Collaboration

The Problem

Enterprise grade quality requirement, escalating labor and opex cost, high turnover rate are key drivers for manufacturing automation initiative, realizing the Lights OFF Intelligent Factory towards a world class operation.

Silicon business goes through memory constrained and demand constrained cycles with high demand volatility while continuously expanding to new markets and business segments which requires supply chain to be demand driven, segmented by products and customers and responsive, which in turn drove need for lights-off planning with accurate globally optimized and frequent planning and execution cycles.

Initial driver for ACOE team set up is to improve productivity of forecating predictive demande by enabling statistical forecasting process, once team is set up, scope eventually expanded to other areas of supply chain such as capacity optimization and now to cost optimization, detailed scheduling towards lights-off factory and planning.

The Solution

Western Digital undertook a multi-year initiative to digitalize its manufacturing and planning processes for its silicon operations. This Digital Supply Chain initiative is enabled by latest technologies including robotics, advanced analytics, optimization, big data etc. The goal was to anticipate and deliver product to customers when and where they need it, and continue to effectively balance customer service level, inventory and cost to serve. This includes Lights-Off manufacturing, Lights-Off Planning and Advanced Analytics.

Next steps of this journey includes expanding big data for end to end value chain including customers and advancing analytics from prescriptive to cognitive/machine learning.

The results

Lights-off manufacturing – Complete manufacturing automation of Shanghai factory producing high mix of more than 1M units per day, using automatic robotic vehicles, automatic robotic storage, automatic scheduling & dispatching, automatic packing, recipe management system, material management system, intelligent command center, analytic quality & process controls, real time management by objectives dashboard, fully connected & integrated wafer-in to products-out automation.

Lights-off planning — Enables demand driven, segmented and a responsive supply chain through systematic funneling of optimized supply plan from long range silicon plan to daily and real time scheduling of builds on shop floor by implementing supply chain planning (multiple instances), scenario planning, inventory optimization, factory planning, detailed scheduling and real time order promising.

Advanced supply chain analytics — Driving supply chain trade-offs and policy decisions through use of predictive analytics (ex: statistical forecasting) and prescriptive analytics (ex: capacity optimization, product and site qualification). These policies are tightly integrated with advanced planning systems and into key business processes.

Metrics

Achieved best in class manufacturing by, complete manufacturing automation of our Shanghai factory producing more than 1M units per day resulting in

• Beyond 6 sigma quality,
• >30% cost reduction and
• Reducing direct labor turnover rate <15% while industrial average is >60% in Shanghai

Enabled demand driven, segmented and responsive supply chain resulting in

• Significant improvement in service level and consistently achieved effective balance between inventory and service level
• Reduced Manufacturing frozen fence for memory assembly starts to 3 days (reduced from 6 weeks in 2008, 2 weeks in 2009, 1 week in 2012, 3 days in 2016)
• Reduced planning cycle time to achieve - Daily planning cycle for push planning, 3 planning cycles per day for pull planning, each shift planning and scheduling for manufacturing, daily/weekly planning cycles for long range planning

Advanced analytics validates or replaces qualitative supply chain trade-offs and policy decisions. These policies are tightly integrated with advanced planning systems and into key business processes

• Capacity optimization resulted in $22M+ savings per year from insource & outsource manufacturing split, factory builds ahead and utilization, capacity buffer and product & site qualification.
• Statistical forecast for 80% of retail product family with similar or better accuracy than manual forecasting.

The Technology

Lights off planning tools includes JDA Demand Management, JDA Supply Chain Planning, JDA Multi Echelon Inventory Optimization, JDA Factory Planner, SAP Global Available to Promise, Advanced Supply Chain Analytics includes CPLEX, MatLab, R, JDA, Tableau.

Disruptive Factor

Lights off planning, Lights off manufacturing, Advanced analytics 

Shining Moment

Complete automation of manufacturing, eliminating excel as planning tool.