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Q&A The Equipment Effectiveness Partnership An interview with Peter Gaudette, Senior Director of Customer Satisfaction, on KLA-Tencor’s program for customer success.
Q
What is the Equipment Effectiveness Partnership and why was it started?
products; it will extend to other KLA-Tencor products this year.
A Increasingly shorter product devel-
Q How does the Equipment
repeats. The program improves communication, performance, and execution between the customer, their local support team, and the factory.
Effectiveness Partnership work?
Q
opment and production cycles will continue to challenge our customers. These technology cycles drive rapidly increasing equipment sophistication and ever-shorter equipment and support development cycles. As a result, we must help our customers employ our products and services at optimum effectiveness in the shortest possible time. In turn, our customers must help us better understand their current and future needs so that our products and services will continue to ensure their competitive advantage. These factors form the basis for the KLA-Tencor Equipment Effectiveness Partnership (EEP). The EEP, a program focused on customer-success, works with select customers to pro-actively improve system performance, produc tivity and reliability by accelerating learning and improvement cycles. This Wafer Inspection Group program is focused on the 2135/8/9 and AIT
What results have been achieved to date?
A
First, we have improved our product development process to achieve far greater equipment maturity and reliability before the start of beta testing. The EEP then accelerates improvement of the product from the start of beta to maturity in the customer’s environment. To maximize the speed and extent of learning and improvement, only customers with challenging usecases were targeted for this program. The EEP team consists of key customer personnel, their local support group, and a KLA-Tencor factory-based program manager. Data collection is initiated and a baseline is established. Next, a key improvement target is selected and an action plan is formulated and implemented. Progress is measured weekly and continues until the success criteria are met. A new target is then selected and the cycle Spring 2000
A
Getting the results deemed most critical by our customers is vital to the success of their business and hence, ours. The EEP is focused on obtaining measurable improvements by evaluating system performance in our customer’s environment. Our customers demand system reliability and have realized significant reliability improvements through the EEP. Combined with improvements in inspection performance and robustness, sensitivity optimization and tool matching on product wafers, the overall result is a measurable gain in performance and productivity. Obtaining the results that our customers need and driving what we both learn back into our development programs, operations, and business processes is the principal focus of the Equipment Effectiveness Partnership.
Yield Management Solutions
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