Management and the Technology Professional – B302

Case study answer 2

Essentially this scenario creates the problem of managing potential faults with the semiconductor products, if these tests are not performed then there is potential for faulty products to enter the marketplace (or other) which would have a detrimental impact on the business. In contrast the products may have passes these tests and functioned normally, in which case continuing with the next step would have no adverse effects (this being the riskiest but potentially least damaging option).Analysing the critical path of this process shows step 6 is within this route, therefore any delay here will delay the whole manufacturing process, there’s no space for increasing the duration without directly effecting the completion date.
In this scenario the available options would be as follows:

• Restart; this would involve delaying step 7 (configure for marketing) in-order to restart step 6 (testing). This would then delay the whole manufacturing process by four days.

• Skip; this would mean skipping step 6 (or the tests not carried out within this step) and continuing the manufacturing process. This would then not cause any holdups, however this could have a far worse outcome, amounting to more than the cost of the batch of products, if it transpired the chips were indeed faulty (i.e. causing a PR disaster / faith lost in brand which would cost more in the long-term).

• Discard batch; in doing this you would be essentially throwing the batch away completely and just start work on the next batch. This wouldn’t technically cause any delay as the product would be taken out of the process, but obviously the batch would be completely written off and not completed, as opposed to the product being delivered late albeit with financial penalties.

Overall you can see that if this was a one-time mistake it potentially may effect this one batch of chips, if the problem was extended over multiple batches (continuous) then these problems could increase exponentially depending on their nature, and if there were any actual faults. Reviewing the three different options mentioned the best decision would be to either restart step 6 or to discard the batch completely. The answer is really twofold as you would need to take into account any financial penalties incurred due to the delay or non-delivery, also whether discarding the batch would automatically mean non-delivery. However using the sources available I would imagine that the late delivery would be the most efficient way of resolving the problem, and thus from the figures believe that restarting the testing step would be the correct course. This would also safeguard Intel’s brand image which would be paramount during any decision especially relating to testing and potential faults.