Equipment part breakdown in the Intel factories, as in many factories is inevitable. These failures typically cause capacity constraints and ultimatley cost the corporation time and money. Equipment parts can be repaired locally or may require shipping to the vendor for repair. Since the repair loop takes significant time, it is necessary to have extra spare parts on-hand to keep the equipment running while broken parts are repaired. It is pertinent to avoid overbuying of the spare parts, as they are very expensive.
Intel needed a model of the repair loop to increase the visibility of problems such as broken parts accumulating at the vendor repair center and sites over purchasing spare parts.
At the AnyLogic Conference 2014, Victor Chang, Software Engineer at Intel presents an AnyLogic simulation that was developed to model the complexities and variability (process step time distributions, repair frequencies, repair center staffing, number of parts in the system, etc.) in the repair loop.
This simulation has been used successfully to help commodity managers convince the supplier that additional parts for consignment is needed (a substantial value to Intel). The simulation tool is also an easy-to-use standalone application that commodity managers and engineers use to run their own scenarios by changing predefined parameters.
Learn more about the project on our case studies page.
Intel Repair Loop:
