A Fortune 100 chipmaker
10 weeks cut from a qualification and certification plan.
Implementation expanded to most of the company's product development groups.
10 weekscut from the qualification plan
Mostproduct development groups adopted the approach
The situation
Qualification testing at the end of development ran on shared machines requiring a high capital investment. The team couldn't give development credible dates, and the first instinct was to buy more machines.
What changed
The test machines, not the people, were scheduled as the bottleneck, in a plan that fed the development schedule. The team could test what-ifs on batch sizes, machine counts and downtime before committing.
The result
- Resources rebalanced in days instead of months on massively parallel design projects.
- Scheduling the machines showed that buying more of them wouldn't have shortened the cycle.