Intelligent Manufacturing € November € 1995 € Vol. 1 € No. 11

Implementing Technological Change at Harris

By David Greenfield
Managing Editor

Sometimes all a company needs is a good crisis to foster the acceptance of new technology. Such was the case at the Harris Corp. Semiconductor Sector (Palm Bay, Fla.), where the development of IMPReSS (Integrated Manufacturing Production Requirements Scheduling Systems) occurred during a period of downsizing following a major acquisition by the company.

The implementation of IMPReSS, a sector-wide, integrated manufacturing production planning and order quotation system, improved the on-time delivery of more than 1 million units a year and 19,000 types of semiconductor products at Harris, thereby significantly enhancing the company's global marketing position and overall profitability. As a result of IMPReSS, Harris' on-time performance went from 74% to an industry best of 95%, and losses of more than $100 million were reversed.

According to Robert Leachman of the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the Harris Corp. project, the most important lesson in developing new technologies for industry is fostering a close involvement between the company and the researchers. "Over the years surrounding the development of IMPReSS, we worked closely with Harris' semiconductor research and development sector. We were part of the sector," said Leachman. "The project was treated as a team effort from the start and not as an outside sales job."

Randy Burdick, who at the time of IMPReSS' development was director of manufacturing systems at Harris, explained how teams were formed to develop IMPReSS. "Harris ran on a CIM (computer-integrated manufacturing) organization and we tried to organize ourselves around the various aspects of the project," he said. "For example, we had a data management team that could look at all the data results holistically, even though the sites where all the data were coming from are geographically dispersed. We also had a planning engine/calculation team that worked directly with Leachman. Another team worked with the factories around the capacity modeling situation. And we had other teams involved with data cleanup."

As work forged ahead on the development of IMPReSS, Harris acquired GE's semiconductor business, tripling Harris' own semiconductor operations. Because GE had been trying to sell their semiconductor business for four years, no investments had recently been made in the sector, leaving its planning methods severely outmoded. When Harris purchased the sector, the company was faced with a huge on-time delivery problem. Other vendors were perceived as providing better service than GE. In addition to having to integrate the GE sectors, moving products between plants and dealing with systems that didn't talk to each other all combined to create a crisis at Harris.

"Suddenly there was an urgent need for a real company-wide planning system embracing all of the factories and all of the products," said Leachman. Management at Harris felt they couldn't simply just match the practices of other companies that were a lot bigger and had a lot more money to invest.

Harris needed to be smarter. "Many semiconductor companies, including Harris, look at their problem from the start as being simply a software or systems project," Leachman said. "They think that if we can just plug in the new system, the problem will be over. That's absolutely not the case. What matters is matching the disciplined data maintenance with the right people responsible for it and reengineering the organization around the workings of the new system. This is inevitable in such a project, and if it doesn't happen, the project won't succeed. That's why it's so essential to understand the company and its operations as if you were approaching a reengineering project."

One of the first steps Harris management and Leachman took toward solving the company's crisis was an audit of operations. This took about six months and involved travel to all of Harris' factories, from the U.S. to the Far East, in order to size up the problem of implementing a planning system across the company's entire semiconductor sector.

"At the time, there were hardly any companies in the semiconductor industry that had managed to fully integrate and automate planning across many factories, and there was a lot of skepticism about whether it could even be done or not," Leachman explained. "Early in the process it was difficult to even make a planning run of the system because the data was so bad."

To improve the data quality at Harris, a period of responsibility assignment began. Team members were given responsibility for all their data and they had to write routines to check the data to show what was inconsistent, incomplete or missing. Other team staff were assigned to get things fixed regarding product structures and nomenclature, factory capability data, etc. Then the data had to be prioritized so that the most important problems could be fixed first.

For Burdick, the most important things to consider in undertaking such a project are to ensure data cleanup and start off with simplistic capacity models. "We began with capacity models that were too complex and difficult for the users to understand and convert to. So the idea behind any such project should be to start off with simplistic capacity models and work toward greater detail as the organization learns. Our early complexity hindered the implementation somewhat; it got in the way and caused problems. The organization as a whole was not mature enough to deal with the more complex models. Lesson learned: Go for a more simplistic capacity model and then drill the organization toward more detail."