Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Tower Semiconductor Harnesses EPM to Improve Project Resource Management
Overview
Country:Israel
Industry:Hi-Tech Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Tower Semiconductor Ltd. is an independent wafer manufacturer that also provides design support, manufacturing, and turnkey services for semiconductor customers.
Business Situation
Tower Semiconductor sought to enhance control over its project schedules and resources, to decrease the amount of time spent re-planning projects, and to reduce the number of plan revisions.
Solution
Using the Microsoft® Office Enterprise Project Management Solution, Tower Semiconductor improved resource allocation and scheduling, reduced planning cycles, and updated Gantt charts faster.
Benefits
Better resource allocation
Improved project scheduling
Reduced number of re-planning cycles
Updated project flowcharts faster / "To continue Tower’s renowned customer support, we must move beyond managing schedules to managing resources, so that we have the right resource available for the right project at the right time.”
Shimon Dahan, Director of Research and Development Operations, Tower Semiconductor Ltd.
As an independent and contract semiconductor factory, Israel-based Tower Semiconductor Ltd. provides design support, manufacturing, and turnkey services for customers that include Motorola, National Semiconductor, and SanDisk. The U.S.$100millioncompany makes more than 200 kinds of chips and specializes in submicron geometries down to 0.18 microns—less than 1/500th the diameter of a human hair. To better manage its projects in the capital-intensive, hypercompetitive, and economically volatile semiconductor market, Tower selected the Microsoft® Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution. The EPM Solution helps Tower to improve its research and development (R&D) project scheduling and R&D resource allocation, reduce the number of re-planning cycles, and revise project flowcharts faster.
Situation
Chipmakers, particularly companies without fabrication labs, look to Tower Semiconductor Ltd. to augment their own silicon design resources by using the company’s specialized design center capabilities. Working with one of Tower’s authorized design centers, chipmakers create their own complete integrated circuit (IC) designs or embedded intellectual property (IP) blocks optimized to exploit Tower Semiconductor's submicron manufacturing process. Despite the two-year downturn in the semiconductor industry, Tower has increased its market share through its focus on submicron technologies and world-class customer support.
Tower also has two fabrication labs that are capable of producing over 50,000 wafers a month. Its Fab 1 facility processes 1.0 to 0.35 micron technologies and produces up to 20,000 150-mm silicon wafers per month. Just coming online, Tower’s Fab 2 facility processes 1.0 to 0.18 micron technologies and offers a production capacity of 33,000 200-mm wafers per month.
“To maintain market share and maintain our world-class customer service, Tower’s focus is to drive even smaller geometries for chips in the future,” says Shimon Dahan, Director of Research and Development Operations at Tower Semiconductor. “To accomplish this, we have to improve project planning and move beyond managing schedules to managing how we allocate resources.”
In the past, Tower project managers would independently use prior versions of Microsoft® Project 2000 to determine and manage schedules without regard to how the schedules interrelated or affected resources. “An independent approach provided no insight about the correlation between a project and its impact on our R&D resources,” says Dahan. “When a project was only a few days long, we had no way to know what resources were really available, which made planning short duration projects difficult.”
One of the business problems the Tower R&D department faced is improving the schedule estimation during the planning period. Previously Tower focused on schedule only and did not manage resources at the project level because of existing platform limitations and internal policy.
“To continue Tower’s renowned customer support, we must move beyond managing schedules to managing resources, so that we have the right resource available for the right project at the right time,” says Dahan.
To keep its competitive edge, Tower needed to find ways to maintain its world-class customer support and get to market faster. That meant enhancing efficiency during the planning and development phases and better managing its R&D resources across its project portfolio.
Solution
Projects at Tower Semiconductor range from a few months to two years and can involve 20 to 40 people and thousands of tasks. Because of slim margins and the high cost of errors in the semiconductor business, Tower wanted an EPM tool that could assist its project managers in overseeing and visualizing schedules and resources for projects of varying duration. With no tools in place to do this, Tower sought out one for its own R&D department.
The company retained Getronics, a $3.3billioncompany headquartered in Amsterdam and one of the world’s leading providers of vendor independent information and communication technology (ICT) solutions and services. For business and project management issues, Tower also engaged Matan Ltd., a leading business consulting and project management firm in Israel. The two vendors adapted a new methodology exploiting the major capabilities of the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution and provided assistance with technical and process implementation issues. The team that managed this implementation consisted of one half-time IT person, two full-time Tower engineers, as well as one Getronics and two Matan consultants.
Tower wanted a project planning solution for its R&D customer projects for appropriate resource allocation, more accurate scheduling, and faster updating of Gantt charts, a project flowchart that can be used to represent the timing of tasks required to complete a project.
Because of Tower’s positive experience with prior versions of Project, the two vendors recommended the Microsoft Office EPM Solution for R&D’s project estimating, scheduling, and resource management during Tower’s planning stages. The implementation of the EPM Solution went smoothly because the consulting companies had experience in various industries and Tower had worked with Matan project management processes.
Tower used two other EPM tools for special projects, primarily prior versions of Project. Together with Matan, Tower developed a methodology for planning and managing R&D projects based on prior versions of Project, but now sees the EPM Solution as a better and easier tool for upgrading R&D’s project management capabilities.
“Using the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management Solution in R&D will improve our ability to get accurate information, analyze data, manage resources, and improve project plan reliability,” says Dahan.
To meet Tower’s requirement for re-planning and restarting projects, Matan developed a customized macro for updating the date fields displayed in the company’s Web reports. The Microsoft Office EPM Solution supported the “actual start” and “actual finish dates.” But to address the resource planning objective, Matan customized several fields to report tasks for projects that needed their start time recalibrated. The R&D department processes required customized date fields for re-planning, so Matan added new fields for “new start,” and “estimate finish.” Project managers and team members can update project start dates for the Web-based reporting using the customized macro to refresh specific field dates.
Benefits
Overall, Tower sees two primary benefits from deploying the Microsoft Office EPM Solution. First, the R&D department will do less re-planning to resolve resource allocation issues on projects. Second, by using Web reporting, the department expects to see a decrease in the resources and project management time needed for updating Gantt charts. And with real-time access to project information via the Web, more R&D team members will be able to report the status of their activities.
With its resource allocation analysis capability, the EPM Solution will help improve Tower’s R&D resource allocation, utilization, and availability information. This information will help Tower estimate and plan its human resource needs more accurately. The R&D department will have more accurate information regarding the required budget and costs for a project. The company sees that the Microsoft Office EPM Solution will increase the productivity and efficiency of its planning and scheduling engineers and will increase the tracking report frequency, improving its progress control.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution has 14 projects and 140 resources in the project database, enabling Tower to start managing its project resources as projects and to have team members report their progress through real-time Web-based reports. The EPM Solution will aid Tower in promoting better work management and collaboration and will foster business insight into projects.
“Having teams report their project progress through the Web, will enable us to capture more accurate information about the project status while ensuring that people feel they are contributing to the project team,” says Dahan.
According to Dahan, Tower expects that successful implementation of the EPM solution in the R&D department will lead other departments to consider the EPM Solution because they will be able to allocate resources better and re-plan projects quickly. He also expects the EPM Solution to change the way his department manages projects in the future.
“We want to be able to manage resources across project portfolios to dramatically improve our work management,” says Dahan. “We will continue to leverage the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management Solution to enhance the visibility of our projects and resources and improve our business processes.”
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