Chapter 4 Case Study

Transcription

1 Liou 44 Chapter 4 Case Study Section 4.1: The Company Company A was established in 1987 as a pure play semiconductor foundry company. Company A started out with providing manufacturing services to fabless and IDMs with generic technologies that were transferred from other companies. Back then the R&D capability in Company A was not a stronghold. Even with limited technology offerings in the early stage, the power of the foundry business model had started to show. An increasing number of companies came to company A for manufacturing services. The customers and company A benefit from each other a great deal, forming great competitive forces against the IDMs. With the strong manufacturing capability and excellent quality and delivery services, Company A was doing extremely well, which resulted in great financial performance. With the financial strength and the increasing demand, Company A built additional fabs in the 1990 s and made a couple of M&A (Merger and Acquisition) at the turn of the century. The established capacity abundance was another strength attracting even more customers. Manufacturing excellence has been one of the Strength Trinity of company A ever since. With the financial strength from the increasing business and profit, Company A was able to invest generously in technology development. Instead of buying technologies or jointly developing technologies with other leading semiconductor technology providers, company A decided to develop the technologies by itself um, 0.25um, 0.18um and all the way to 0.13 Cu processes paved the way for company A to become a clear technology leader in the semiconductor foundry segment. Customers would not feel short of technology competitiveness at all when working with company A. As of today, Company A has strong market share in 90nm, 65nm and the upcoming 45nm technologies. Technology has become the 2nd one of the Strength Trinity. The third one of the Strength Trinity is the customer service. As of today, there are a few hundreds of active customers doing business with Company A. Handling the diversified business needs from so many customers in the areas of design, engineering and logistics is quite a challenge. In the 1990 s, Company A brought up the vision of Virtual Fab. The vision of Virtual Fab is to make all Company A s customers, when conducting business with Company A, feel as if they are working with their own fab, or even better.

2 Liou 45 Company A would like all her customers to NOT want to build and own their fabs, since they already have the fab virtually, when working with company A. As the trend of using foundry gets more popular, the industry had the interesting story flowing around: Jerry Sander, AMD s co-founder and ex-ceo, had a famous statement real men own fabs. However, in recent years, another statement came up to counter Sanders statement, but the smart ones don t. These two statements are a good reflection of the business model transition from IDM to the combination of Fabless / Foundry. In summary, Company A has the Trinity of Strength, Manufacturing Excellence, Technology Leadership, and Superior Customer Service. The 3rd strength, Customer Service will be the focus of this chapter. Section 4.2: The Services Offered by the Company Foundry services have a broad range due to the nature of the business engagement between the customers and the foundry service provides, like Company A. Figure 4.1 depicts the services by company A with respect to the IC life cycle. Figure 4.1

3 Liou 46 1) Technology Consultation and Selection: Before a product can be designed, IC design houses must select a target manufacturing technology from a few available candidates offered by the foundry company. For example, should the 0.13um be selected over 0.18um or 90nm? The significance of the selection process is profound since it may make or break a product, since the product specifications, the IP/Library availability, price/performance and competitors selection all need to be taken into consideration. 2) Design Service: IC design houses, before handing over the IC design to foundry companies, have a number of interactions with the design service organizations of the foundry companies. The work includes device analysis, design rules consideration, IP/Library development/ co-development, and many other bridging works between IC design and wafer manufacturing. 3) Design for Manufacturing Services: One issue with the clear division of labor for design and manufacturing is that designers may come up with good designs that provide good functionalities on paper (actually in computer simulations), but the designs need to be realized by manufacturing. In order to provide guidance to designers in terms of the manufacturability of the design, company A has developed a series of guiding tools to aid IC designers to have IC product designs that result in high yield, high throughput, and friendly to manufacturing processes. All these virtues are collectively called manufacturability. 4) Mask Services: masks are a critical part of wafer manufacturing. They carry the IC design patters, layer by layer, and they are used as guide the wafer process to the layout specifications. Some foundry companies rely on outside 3rd parties to produce the masks for their customers. Company A, on the other hand, decides to integrate the mask making operation with its wafer manufacturing, providing shorter cycle time and better product yield and quality.

4 Liou 47 5) Wafer Manufacturing Services: wafer manufacturing is the core of the foundry services. All other services aim to helping a successful wafer manufacturing. Foundry customers expect foundry company to produce low cost and high quality wafers, which they can take to their OSAT (Out-Sourced Assembly and Test) houses to complete the IC chips. 6) Bumping, Color Filtering, CP testing: semiconductor manufacturing, over time, has had additional process steps. Significant ones are the bumping and color filtering processes. Company A offers them either in-house or through affiliated partners. Traditional CP (Circuit Probe) is also offered. 7) Multiple Project Wafer (MPW) service: this is basically a mask sharing service among multiple customers, offered to customers during the design verification phase. Company A named this service Cyber Shuttle. Shuttles are launched regularly for multiple customers to ride to produce small amount of wafers for IC design houses to verify their ICs functionality before mass production. This service is of much importance, especially for customers launching products using leading technologies due to high mask cost. It would be ideal if mask cost can be minimized while conducting multiple trials for the product prototypes. 8) Quality, Reliability and Failure Analysis: IC s are intermediate products that need to be assembled to electronic boards, which then go into systems. Quality and reliability issues will be costly if discovered at the tail end of the supply chain. So, quality, reliability requirements for semiconductor are stringent. Company A has a comprehensive set of quality assurance and reliability services offered to customers. 9) Turn-key services: most design houses only go to foundry companies for wafer manufacturing and wafer manufacturing related services. Once they get the wafers, they handle the Back-end outsourcing with their back-end suppliers. However, some design houses (and

5 Liou 48 mostly system houses) choose to outsource the whole IC manufacturing, wafer and back-end, to foundry companies. This is often called turn-key services. 10) Failure Analysis Services: Even with very stringent quality and reliability processes and standards, IC s in a system do fail from time to time. Failure analysis is very critical in not only deciding the responsibilities for the failure, but also leaning what went wrong and deriving solutions from it. In this, company A, also offers a series of failure analysis tools and services. 11) Logistic services: traditional logistic services, such as order management, planning (demand, production and capacity) collaboration, shipping, export/import, RMA (Returned Material Authorization), are also very important in the foundry industry. 12) Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) Services: all the services mentioned above require extensive interactions between the two parties (sometimes three parties). With the Internet technologies, e- Commerce has become a common platform for the interactions. From this perspective, company A leverages many available IT technologies to provide customers advanced features through 1) customer portal, 2) system-to-system B2Bi (business-to-business integration) and 3) proprietary IT solutions to enable the "e- Commerce services. In summary, the services mentioned above offered by company A, will be further analyzed in the following sections in the form of Collaborative Commerce to understand how effectively Company A leverages the internal business process and system alignment and the Internet technologies to further cut the cycle time and overall cost to conduct business with its customers.

6 Liou 49 Section 4.3: Collaborative Commerce Solutions at Company A There are a few different ways to look at company A s collaborative commerce offerings. One way is to look at them from the IT technology standpoint. From this perspective, company A has five major platforms to conduct interaction with its customers: Section Platform View: From the system function standpoint, company A offers the following 5 solutions: 1) Customer Portal Solution (A-Online), 2) Direct System-to-System Solution (A-Direct), 3) Yield Enhancement System (A-YES), Internet Layout Viewer (A-ILV) and 5) e-jobview (AeJobView). Following are the categorical discussion for each solution. Customer Portal Solution (A-Online): The Customer Portal Solution is a customer web site, which provides company A s proprietary information in many areas which customers need to conduct business with company A. In addition, information related to customers past, current and future product and production information is also provided through this portal. Constantly there are 400+ customers with active users accessing the information through this portal. This is the primary window through which customers can see through to access their virtual fab. Company A has invested a significant amount of capital and resources in building up the portal since late 1990 s. Security is the upmost important focus of the system since the system carries critical information not only to company A, but also to its customers. Access control is equally critical due to the fact that many of company A s customers are competitors to one another. Any information leakage or customers cross accessing information for one another would cause disastrous result. Customers have come to relying on the portal solution on the 365 x 24 basis. For this, company A has built an HA (High Availability) architecture for the system, including a dual-site architecture across the Pacific Ocean. The main features of the Portal Solution are described below: Services and Technologies: in this area, company A corporate introduction, high level technology offering, capacity plan, manufacturing sites, product, market/application/segment, customer profile (IDM, fab-less, system company) are disclosed. This information may not be as essential to the existing customers as to the new customers who are in the process of

7 Liou 50 engaging with company A in the early stage. Processes on how to engage with company A for new business is also introduced here. Also, as depicted in Fig. 4.1, the overall services available are mapped out for customers to select wherever they see fit. Designer s Portal: This is the area where customers product development and design team get the information they need to launch a project and continue onto the product development phase. Documents such as PDK (Process Design Kit), SPICE Model, DFM (Design Rule Manual), Technology files (DRC, LVS, etc.) and many others design and process related documents, essential to IC design, are categorized and listed in this portal. In addition to listing the various technical documents in an orderly fashion, Company A went one step forward to establish a unique offering called Bill of Document (BOD). BOD s concept is to relieve customers designers from knowing and memorizing all the details in order to select and download all sorts of technical documents before starting their design work and constantly having to remember to check out the latest documents during the whole design life cycle. What BOD does then is to ask the designers a series of questions and ask the designers to build simple project folders. Once the questions are answered and project folders are created, the BOD system will grab all the needed documents for a specific technology the customer design is targeted at and put them in a chain type of structure for the designers to reference. From that point on the BOD system will keep updating the files whenever there is a new change to any one of the files and keep the relationship consistent. A notification mechanism was also built to notify the customer designers when the changes occur. This way, the customer designers can totally focus on their designs and not worry about not knowing company A s process change that may impact the design. This has been a very important feature to avoid wrong design. BOD concept is depicted in Fig Another feature in the Design Portal is the Potential Die Count Advisor (PDCA) and its associated Technology Selector. When a customer of company A is evaluating whether to launch a product development project, it is vital to know the number of die a wafer will produce, since it directly impacts the cost of the product. PDCA assists the customers to determine the potential die count with a series of technical questions. With the information, together with other technical information to determine the functionality and features certain technologies can offer, customers can then decide on the technology for the specific product development project.

8 Liou 51 Customer Services and Satisfaction: foundry services have a unique nature. That is that customers and the foundry company have multi-point contacts during the whole product life cycle. Pre-production contacts, in-production, and post-production contacts are extremely frequent. As a result, it is very important that company A has a solid process and system to capture all the service issues and has a quick way to trigger corrective actions within the company and respond to customers. In the area, FORD 8-D based process is implemented. Customers can file complaints on-line and receive responses electronically. Internally company A has such a structure where issue owners and solution providers have clear division of labor to get issues resolved in a timely manner. Delayed issue resolutions get escalated automatically to get higher management s attention. Post sales service issues (field return, RMA and end-customer issues) are also included in this. Production Information: On the customer portal, production information is the most used area among all in terms of daily visits. Through these years, company A has built a very strong internal IT systems suite, from SFC (Shop Floor Control), MES (Manufacturing Execution System), SCM (Supply Chain Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), OM (Order Management) and most importantly, WIP (Work in Process) tracking system. With the strong internal systems foundation, company is able to provide such feature as Real- Time WIP (query from any browser) up to the second to see where each lot of product are in the manufacturing process. Many customers were impressed when the first enjoyed this advanced features a few years ago and now they pretty much take this for granted and ask every company in the foundry industry to match this bar. Another novel feature company A offers in this area is the real time lot handling system. While the Real Time WIP is to show where each lot is in real time, the Real Time Lot Handling allows the customers to give lot handling instructions (hold, change part, release and a few others) in real time and the system will respond accordingly. The power of this feature really shows when the customers need to do engineering experiment to the lots. With this feature, the customers have full control over the products that are running in their virtual fab. In addition to the two important features in the production information area, ways to show production information, including wafer, mask and back-end services, together with customer order information can all be customized to each customer s needs. Lastly, some

9 Liou 52 customers who can t afford to build system-to-system link with company A, oftentimes write small systems to download the information from the customer portal and load to their internal systems to further process the data in their native ways. Business Transactions: This is the area where real system level transactions occur. The first one is the online tape-out system. Tape-Out, a special term in the semiconductor industry, is when customers finished their product designs and hand the IC design layouts to company A to produce the masks and get ready for pilot run. Quite intensive interactions in the system occur in this transaction, which is the key to successful mask making, an important step towards successful silicon production. A few days after the tape-out and mask making the design will go into a 1-2 month pilot wafer production. Another important feature in this area is the MPW shuttle service. As discussed previously, customers who need to verify whether a design would work at a reasonable cost is to share masks with other customers. With company A s special arrangement, these customers would have no way to know who they are sharing the masks with. They would each get their share of the masks and wafers to conduct their design verification. Transactions to reserve their spots on the shuttle and to provide all the technical details needed to make the masks are conducted here. If the customer has multiple design projects to verify and would not want to share the masks with other customers, they can also book a private shuttle where they have more flexibility than riding the shared shuttle. Last but not least, Customer Test Line is a very useful feature which allows customers to maintain and manage the test lines used in wafer manufacturing. Test lines are the circuits the wafer manufacturing line has to build in each wafer to test during the wafer manufacturing process. Customers, on the other hand, for special purposes, may want to put in their own proprietary test lines to gain some insight during the wafer processing. A sophisticated customer test line management mechanism is built in the customer portal and linked with the tape-out system to embed the test lines in each tape-out. Technical Documents: When conducting the IC design, the designers depend on the process technology specs and guidelines to make sure the IC design they come up with will function the way they are designed. Therefore, it is very critical that all the technical specs, up to date, are strictly followed. In this area, all the technical related documents are maintained for designers to

10 Liou 53 reference and download. Relationships are built to make sure the browsing and searching can be effective. Typical types of documents are Foundry Design Documents, Technology Files, Yield Improvement Documents, and Quality and Reliability Documents. Although serving documents seems ordinary, behind the scene, there is a lot of effort and system support to make sure the documents are well maintained. Mask Services: Mask making is a very critical part of wafer manufacturing. Built in the customer portal is a set of utility tools for customers to do simulation before submitting the data for mask making. Simulation results will be utilized to debug any problems before the masks are actually made to save back-and-forth cycle time and cost. A set of mask making documents is also included for customers reference. Oftentimes, customers would like to know the status of the mask making for a product they are eager to start. Real time information is available for customers to query. Assembly and Test: Wafer manufacturing is the main business of company A. However, when doing business with systems companies and/or IC design houses that do not want to handle the assembly and final test (the back end ) part of the semiconductor manufacturing processes, company A offers the turn-key business. In this business, Company A conducts the wafer manufacturing and then turns around to assembly and test houses to outsource the business to them. To company A s customers, they outsource the whole IC manufacturing to company A, not just the wafer manufacturing. Company A has to manage the engineering and logistics from order in to IC out. What is presented in the customer portal has to be coherent to the customers. In addition, with the increasing importance of the wafer and packaging integration, packaging design for manufacturability (P-DFM) becomes essential. Company A provides a set of tool kits for the customers to design their packages to be compatible with the companies wafer technologies. This way, customers can get a robust IC product. Quality and Reliability: In this area, quality and reliability related guidelines and rules are clearly disclosed to customers. Since there quite a few fabs in company A, the fab standardization reports are important to customers, which are also updated and presented here. Moreover, an advanced e-reliability Model System is available here in the customer

11 Liou 54 portal for customers to do reliability modeling work before and after they have come up with their product design. The Customer Portal Solution at Company A has gone through a 12 year-growth and enhancement. Sources of enhancement ideas come from two sources: 1) internal innovation through a very strong e-commerce solution team, and 2) customer inputs and customization requests coming from customers who use the system very heavily. In summary, with the Customer Portal solution, a typical customer without the direct systemto-system link solutions or a large scale account support team (not feasible unless a large and strategic account) can get quite adequate service and support. This is why company A s customer portal solution get used very extensively by its broad customer base. Up to date, there have been a few hundred customers and more than two thousands active users take advantage of the system very frequently. Direct System-to-system Link (A-Direct): Customer Portal Solution works very well for many customers, especially for the ones that do not have a strong set of internal systems. However, for the customers who already have particular ways of operating on a set of internal systems, they would prefer the information to be fed to their systems via a company-to-company and system-to-system link over the Internet. Oftentimes, this kind of system-to-system link is referred to as B2Bi (Business to Business integration). System-to-system link establishment existed before Internet got its popularity. The most famous solution is EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). EDI was widely accepted by well established trading partners in the 1970 s and 1980 s. However, heavily relying on premium-based VAN (Value-Added Network) was not a big pusher for the adoption of the solution. Although EDI was adopted in the early stage of the foundry industry, including company A, the increasing popularity of Internet hindered the future of EDI and gave the opportunity to the FTP-based ad-hoc proprietary protocols for data exchange between companies conducting supply chain collaboration. The system architecture diagram is depicted in figure 4.2 below.

12 Liou 55 Figure 4.2 Through the years, company A developed many A-standard data exchange with many of its customers. Inevitably, many customers requested, one-off solutions were also developed to satisfy individual customers needs. As the needs to do B2Bi increase and proprietary solutions are not very effective in terms of implementation and maintenance, an industry-wide consortium was formed to address the needs, the RosettaNet Consortium. In 1998, RosettaNet (named after the Rosetta Stone for its ability to translate among several ancient languages) started out with the objective to address the integration needs in the supply chain of Electronic, IT, communication and semiconductor industries, with key players like Intel, IBM, HP, Microsoft, CISCO, NEC, Simens, etc. being the founding companies. As of today, there are six global councils: 1. Computer and Consumer Electronics Council (CCE), for consumer electronics supply chain, including OEM, Channels, Retailers, and Service Providers.

13 Liou Electronic Components Council (EC), for EC supply chain, including semiconductor suppliers, Passive devices, connector suppliers, channels and customers. 3. Logistics Council (LG), for Logistics service providers, including forwarders, channels, customs, freight companies, etc. 4. Semiconductor Manufacturing Council (SM), for semiconductor supply chain including IDM, IC Design Companies, Wafer Foundry, Material Suppliers, Equipment vendors, Assembly and Test companies. 5. Solution Providers Council (SP), for solution providers for the RosettaNet solutions, including software companies, system integrators and consulting firms. 6. Telecommunications Council (TC), for the telecommunication supply chain, including network operator and communication equipment vendors. As a founding member of the SM Council, company A has been actively participating in the standards development in the RosettaNet Consortium based on its extensive experience in the prior work of proprietary protocol development and its unique and strong industry position. A total of four PIPs were developed specifically by company A and other participating companies in the SM Council, which are: 1) PIP 7B1 (WIP): work-in-process from manufacturing suppliers and customers 2) PIP 7B5 (work order): from customers to manufacturing suppliers 3) PIP 7B6 (work order reply): from manufacturing suppliers to customers 4) PIP 7C7 (notification of test data) from manufacturing suppliers to customers PIPs (Partner Interface Process), as RosettaNet calls the various standard interfaces, not only define the information format (XML-based), but also the integration business processes between the trading partners. With the embedment of the business process in the information standards, RosettaNet PIPs have played a very important role in the semiconductor foundry

14 Liou 57 supply chain integration. The following table in Table 4.1 shows the PIPs that have been implemented between company A and its major trading partners (including customers and assembly/test subcontractors). There are a lot of 14 types of PIPs and a total of 110 instances of PIP implementation with 71 instances of RosettaNet PIPs, 39 instances of proprietary (either A-Standard or custom) PIPs. The most popular PIP is WIP (7B1) and Advance Shipping Notice (7B6). Table 4.1, PIP Implementation With the PIPs, the customers and company A are virtually linked together in terms of daily operation in these particular areas, which brings the vertically dis-integrated trading partners a giant step closer. A complete collaboration scenario can be briefly described to show how a customer may interact with company A on a routine basis as follows in Figure 4.3:

15 Liou 58 Figure 4.3 Engineering Data Analysis (A-YES): Engineering data analysis is a very critical task during wafer manufacturing, both for company A and the customers. The primary purpose is to improve yields, including the fab line yield, probe (CP) yield and Final Test (FT) yield. Yield has significant impact to semiconductor capacity and cost reduction. Imagine a fab with 70K wafers/month capacity, which cost 3B USD to build. If the yield can be improved by 5%, it would directly translate to a total of 3,500 wafers / month more capacity to producing more wafers. Revenue wise, it would mean as much as 10 million USD per month more. Cost wise, this would mean a saving of 150 hundred million USD. That is why a lot of attention is focused on yield improvement. Yield improvement takes both sides, the IC designer, and the manufacturing process engineers, to be successful. In the past, it was not easy for the two sides to collaborate. Files and s had to be exchanged back-and-forth very frequently. Time lag and mis-communication may occur from time to time. Wrong versions, wrong data, and wrong time often cause ineffectiveness and frustration. This impacts the yield improvement progress, which in turns impacts customers time-to-market and time-to-volume. Company A

16 Liou 59 spent a few years in R&D with external solution providers and developed the A-YES (Yield Enhancement System). Figure 4.4 shows the high level architecture of A-YES. Figure 4.4 A-YES utilizes a powerful engineering database to collect massive amount of process data, CP yield data and FT yield data for various analysis for in-line process improvement, yield analysis and improvement, BKM (Best Known Method) development. A typical A-YES feature is depicted in Figure 4.5. A-YES is used internally by product engineers. A-YES is also used over the Internet by customers product and process engineers. Collaborative features are also embedded for both sides to use to conduct simultaneous engineering analysis. Company A has high reputation in the industry to have excellent yield. Customers, seemingly paying higher price for company A s wafers, actually gets return on the high yield and high quality from company A s wafers.

17 Liou 60 Typical A-YES Features Figure 4.5 Internet Layout Viewer (A-ILV): Layout, when used in the IC design context, refers to the circuit diagram in an IC. IC designers use an EDA tool (Electronic Design Automation) to design the complex IC circuits. Before ready, the IC circuit layout need to be reviewed by a number of people, especially foundry s design service personnel to make sure there are no major issues in terms of violation of manufacturing process design rules. Company A, working with external solution providers, developed an Internet-based Layout Viewer, which can be shared in real time by multiple parties. A rich set of collaborative features are embedded in the system, such as conferencing, online marking, version control, etc. Many customers have benefit from this Internet Layout Viewer in terms of the shortened product development cycle and time-to-

18 Liou 61 market. Figure 4.6 depicts a typical layout viewing screen the designers and process engineers normally jointly review through the internet remotely. Figure 4.6 ejobview (A-eJobView): JobView is a very unique process in the semiconductor industry. As discussed previously, mask making is a critical part of the semiconductor manufacturing process. When the layout (discussed in previous section) is finalized, the GDS file, the mask making data, needs to be taped out to the masking making shop, which company has in house, for the mask making preparation. A intermediate step is usually needed before mask can be made. This intermediate step is called Job View. Job here refers to mask making job. What is viewed in a job view is the mask layout, translated from the IC layout with a lot of massaging using Optical algorithm, called OPC (Optical Proximity Correction). In the past, customers need to fly to company A s premises for the job view on company A s mask shop s proprietary systems. Joint reviewing by customer and company A s personnel occurs during

19 Liou 62 the JobView. Corrections, if any, are made before the mask is physically made. Any undetected errors would be enormously costly, not only from the mask and wafer waste (cost) standpoint, but also from the cost associated with losing an opportunity to demo a product in a trade show, which may result in huge market and financial loss. With A-eJobView, all the work can be done at customers premises over the Internet, resulting in cost and time saving, directly translated to once again, time-to-market. A typical screen shot of A-eJobView is depicted in Figure 4.7. Figure 4.7

20 Liou 63 Section Functional View: In the previous section, company A s collaborative commerce was analyzed from the point of view of systems and features, where functions were described in terms of how they work and how they can be used. In this section, the researcher tries to analyze company A s collaborative commerce from the semiconductor product life cycle standpoint. In this way, these collaborative commerce features can be organized in a way that would lend themselves to a better grouping for the matrix analysis in the next chapter. Therefore in this section, the features will be grouped into four groups: 1) General, 2) Design Collaboration, 3) Engineering Collaboration, and 4) Logistic Collaboration. Figure 4.8 depicts the semiconductor product life cycle and the scopes of the three collaborations between company A and her customers. Figure 4.8

21 Liou 64 General: General functions are basically the functions that go across the entire life cycle of the semiconductor product development, production and after production services. In company A s collaborative commerce portfolio, there are three features listed below. a. Services and Technologies on A-Online b. Customer Services and Satisfactions on A-Online c. Q&R on A-Online Design Collaboration: As depicted in figure 4.8, design collaboration refers to the needed collaboration between company A and the customers during a period when the design related work was the majority of the back-end-forth interactions between the two parties. This is a very foundational collaboration, which the decision as to whether a product development project should be launched and how it should be launched is based on. If the project was not properly evaluated due to inadequate, wrong or misleading information from company A, the risk of ultimate failure of the project is very high. As a result, company A put in a lot of effort in this area to assure the collaboration capabilities are strong and robust to support the 1 st step right. The Features are listed below: a. PDCA (Potential Die Count Advisor) on A-Online b. BOD (Bill of Document) on A-Online c. DFM (Design for Manufacturing) on A-Online d. Circuit Layout Viewer on A-ILV Engineering Collaboration: Engineering collaboration refers to the needed collaboration between compaupny A and the customers during a period when the engineering related work was the majority of the backend-forth interactions between the two parties. After the product is designed, it will be taped out to company A for pilot run. During the pilot run, a lot of engineering activities need to happen between the two parties. After the tape-out, successive yield enhancement work is

22 Liou 65 the focus. The objective of this collaboration is to make sure the engineering issues are resolved and the product can go into production. engineering collaboration: The following are the features for a. Tape-Out Transactions on A-Online b. Mask Job View on A-eJobView c. Real Time Lot Handling on A-Online d. Remote Yield Analysis on A-YES e. B2Bi Engineering on A-Direct Logistic Collaboration: Logistic collaboration refers to the needed collaboration between company A and the customers during a period when the logistic related work was the majority of the back-endforth interactions between the two parties. After the product was design, pilot run with most of the engineering issues resolved, the production starts. In order to run a lean and responsive supply chain, the customers work with company A very closely on PO placement, WIP management, expedite (pull in) and slow down (push out), capacity arrangement (inhouse and company A and outsource to sub-cons), shipping, and many other activities. The features for logistic collaboration are listed below: a. Real Time WIP on A-Online b. Product and Mask information on A-Online c. PO and WIP netting on A-Online d. B2Bi Logistics on A-Direct The four categories and the sub-categories, together with the transaction cost types mentioned in chapter two s literature review, will form the two dimensions of the matrix analysis in the next chapter. For notation purposes, they may be referred to as (example) G-a (for General, function a), DC-b (Design Collaboration, function b), EC-c (Engineering Collaboration, function c), and LC-d (Logistic Collaboration, function d).

23 Liou 66 Section 4.4: Customer Survey In order to measure the effectiveness of collaborative commerce, company A conducted surveys to acquire customers feedback directly, based on which further enhancement can be directed. The following four steps were taken for this customer survey: 1. Preparation: (a) develop execution plan (b) internal survey for desired outcome (c) confirm survey population (paper and Internet) (d) develop and confirm survey questionnaire content (e) send out invitation and questionnaire to customers 2. Survey Execution (a) Schedule survey (b) Activate Web survey (c) Collect survey responses and provide abnormal events 3. Analysis and Summarization (a) Analyze survey result (b) Management review and direction setting 4. Follow-up (a) Develop future improvement plan (b) Periodically check the status the improvement plan execution (c) Send appreciation letters to customers (d) Result evaluation for improvement plan In order to ascertain the information within this survey, the following questionnaire was distributed to the clients: Within the area of E-Commerce services, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the following aspects? (score 1~7)

24 Liou 67 Q1: Overall satisfaction with E-Commerce services provided by A-company? Q2: Overall satisfaction with E-Commerce services provided by B-company? Q3: Satisfaction level with the following aspects of A-company E-Commerce services? (a) Online availability of the latest information you need (b) The accuracy of the logistics information (c) The accuracy of engineering information (d) Richness of E-Commerce Service functionality (e) Ease of understanding/using the online content (f) Ease of locating the information you need (g) Scope of E-commerce Services Q4. Satisfaction level with the following aspects of B-company E-Commerce services? (a) Online availability of the latest information you need (b) The accuracy of the logistics information (c) The accuracy of engineering information (d) Richness of E-Commerce Service functionality (e) Ease of understanding/using the online content (f) Ease of locating the information you need (g) Scope of E-commerce Services To gain the survey efficiency, both interview survey and web survey were conducted. A total of 554 surveys were conducted and 319 forms were returned. The completion rate is 58%. Customers across the world participated, with North America and Asia being the largest two, which is in line with company A s customer base profile. As indicated in the table below, Fabless, IDM and systems companies were all in the survey, with system companies being the small minority.

25 Liou 68 Table 4.2 Company A s e-commerce Survey Demography North America Europe Japan Asia Total Total Survey Completed Survey Completion Rate 54% 60% 63% 62% 58% Web Survey Interview Survey Fabless Customer IDM Customer Systems Customer The survey result is broken down to 8 categories. Their scores respectively are: A, Scope of Services: 6 out of 7 B, Functionality: 5.94 out of 7 C, Information Availability: 5.94 out of 7 D, Ease of Understanding : Using: 6.06 out of 7 E, Ease of Locating On-line Information: 5.82 out of 7 F, Engineering Information Accuracy: 6.06 out of 7 G, Logistic Information Accuracy: 5.76 out of 7 H, Overall E-Commerce Services: 5.71 out of 7 In general, company A s customers are pleased with the collaborative commerce services (5.91 out of scale of 7). Compared with the services they received from other foundry companies, the difference is significant (5.91 vs. 4.06; gap of 1.85). feedback, company A is able to continue the enhancement effort. With this survey

26 Liou 69 Survey Results Figure 4.9