WIP builds at a bottleneck toolset. An IE works out which parameters to change, adjusts the weightings, and the queue clears. Two weeks later, the mix shifts or a tool goes down, and congestion moves somewhere else.

A high-mix or high-volume fab runs thousands of rules and parameters - impossible to maintain all of them against every state the fab moves through. So you prioritize. A weighting gets set to cover most products, not all of them. A batching threshold from three years ago stays where it is because nothing has obviously broken. These are sensible decisions under time pressure, but they show up later in cycle time, throughput, and OTD.

Two places where tuning stops paying

The first is the complex toolset. Diffusion carries batching decisions and queue time constraints that pull against each other. Photo turns on reticle allocation, where every move risks a fragile and expensive resource. In both, the objectives compete, making the rules and parameters the hardest to maintain.

The second is fab-wide scheduling. Managing lot movement across the whole line is a different problem again, and rules can't carry that much complexity — so what runs in practice is usually a simple set of rules that doesn't cover many of the cases.

The knowledge that makes tuning work sits with one or two engineers rather than in the system itself.

So how do you fix that without ripping out what you already have?

Join Sebastian Steele, Product Director at Flexciton, who will walk through where rules-based scheduling runs out, what an optimization-based approach does with the same decisions, and how it gets added on top of your existing system rather than in place of it.

You will learn

• How complex constraints at diffusion and photo can be handled through optimization, and why the approach holds when the mix or tool availability changes
• How optimization-based fab-wide scheduling keeps decisions at each toolset aligned with what's happening downstream, without anyone telling it the bottleneck has moved
• What deploying an optimization layer alongside an existing dispatcher or scheduler actually involves, area by area, without changing what operators see
• Where to start, depending on whether you're running dispatching only, a deployed scheduler, or nothing yet

Who should attend

• Industrial engineers and IE managers who own the scheduling rules and parameters and maintain them
• Production control managers accountable for WIP flow, priorities, and on-time delivery
• Fab and manufacturing managers who carry cycle time, throughput, and OTD targets

Whether your fab runs a rules-based scheduler, an advanced dispatcher, or both, this session is about the decisions that sit above them.

Duration

The webinar session is 60 min, including 15 minutes of live Q&A with Seb.

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