The post -maintenance era of complex equipment management in the semiconductor industry: The case of Intel Corporation

Equipment management has received significant attention during the recent years in the semiconductor industry because of the industry's dynamic characteristics and the increasing cost of capital equipment. The inefficiencies in equipment management have a greater impact on a company's output and profit. In many segments of the semiconductor industry, this situation is made worse because the technology becomes obsolete at a very rapid rate, causing a very short equipment useful life. Equipment is operated continuously and performs more and more complex tasks. As a result, managing equipment performance becomes a challenging task for managers in semiconductor companies.;Equipment management has gone through the pre-maintenance era, which was the breakdown management phase in the pre-1950 period, and the maintenance era, which consisted of the preventive maintenance phase in the 1950s, the productive maintenance phase in the 1960s, the "Total Productive Maintenance" (TPM) phase in 1970s, and the TPM with predictive maintenance phase since the 1980s. Up until now, equipment management has been operated in the maintenance era at large. The conclusive focus of maintenance approaches is on the optimization of equipment availability. However, it is equipment utilization that determines the output and profit of a factory. The maintenance organizational structure is often based on a functional setup. The whole picture is often not fully comprehended, allowing inefficiencies to occur in the equipment management process.;Because the maintenance methods cannot meet today's requirements, especially in the semiconductor industry, Intel started to challenge the old norms in equipment management and eliminated the functional division in maintenance. The equipment management process is consolidated under a single ownership. The maintenance departments are replaced by platform engineering departments with their responsibilities extended beyond maintenance to include equipment development as well as equipment utilization, and thus providing a total solution to optimizing equipment output.;This dissertation research highlights this new era in equipment management as the "post-maintenance era" by utilizing the systems approach to examine the new era under the areas of environmental, goals and values, structural, technical psychosocial, and managerial subsystems. The platform convergence theory is proposed to signify this new paradigm shift in equipment management.