Lockheed Martin's Focal Plane division in Goleta CA needed to increase capacity in its wafer fab and focal plane electronic assembly areas.  After generating several preliminary designs, DeHart Consulting was hired to review the factory layouts within the context of lean manufacturing principles and to assist with the overall factory redesign efforts.

The primary processes involved were photolithography, chemical vapor deposition, electron-beam metallization, wet chemical etching, precision grinding, dicing, epoxy die attach, wire-bonding, and functional test.  There were a variety of ancillary operations as well.

The spaghetti diagrams for both the existing and contemplated layouts indicated a confusion of co-mingled processes and shared resources that conflicted with basic lean manufacturing principles.  The actual cycle-times were also suffering from the elongated physical process distances.  DCI analyzed both the processes, proposed and existing layouts, and developed a focused-factory approach that created individual factories for wafer fab and focal plane assembly.  The resulting design reduced process distances by 64% and 83% in the wafer fab and die sub-assembly areas respectively and gained substantial support for the necessary capital expenditure!