Field Solutions
Strengthening Field Engineers' Customer Responsiveness
To further expand the scale of our business, it is extremely important to increase the number of field engineers, developing personnel that can promptly play an active role, as well as to effectively improve the skills of existing field engineers. It is also vital that we optimize our resource allocation from a global perspective, concentrating personnel in high demand areas and appropriately transferring personnel with a high level of expertise to the areas that need them.
Due to geopolitical factors and investment support backed by national policies, a growing number of customers are globally expanding their business operations or entering the semiconductor industry for the first time. This is making it even more important to expand and enhance our support sites. We must understand their individual needs and characteristics and go beyond the boundaries of local subsidiaries and business units to appropriately assign human resources with essential capabilities where they are needed, creating a system that helps increase the production capacities of our customers.
We establish a Group-wide common skills management system that meets the standards of Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) and plans to continuously upgrade skills based on the detailed goals established every year. We effectively train newly hired personnel through our “Ichininmae engineer* development project,” a three-year program that begins after hiring and provides new employees with the skills and experience they will need as field engineers. Furthermore, we are expanding our program to reassign engineers who had undergone training at manufacturing sites in Japan to the field after their return to their companies, as part of our education for expert engineers for overseas subsidiaries. In this program, engineers strive not only to deepen their knowledge of equipment technology but also to further improve communication with development and manufacturing divisions. During the program period, engineers from overseas subsidiaries receive support from Japan, enabling them to understand customers’ situations in a timely manner and further contribute as site leaders upon returning to their home countries.
As a result of these initiatives, we have earned high praise from our customers for the speed, efficiency, and dedication of our services. We will continue to use feedback from our customers to strengthen our customer responsiveness.
Ichininmae engineer: Full-fledged engineer
Creation of New Value through Sharing Knowledge and Experience
Employees with abundant work experience publish their insights and what they have learned through their careers on the internal intranet to provide junior and mid-level employees with opportunities to lay out their own career paths and future visions. We have expanded this initiative to our overseas subsidiaries, as well, as we aim to pass on our DNA, such as our customer-oriented approach, openness, and teamwork,
to our global junior and mid-level employees, and to create new value while adapting to the changing times.
Support Services that Extend the Life Cycle of Equipment
As part of our efforts to have our customers use our equipment over a long period of time, we provide LEAP*, a support service that extends the life cycle of our equipment. Support for semiconductor production equipment typically ends seven to eight years after discontinuation of equipment due to the discontinuation of parts or the difficulty in maintaining safety and quality. For this reason, equipment for which support has ended is discarded and replaced with succeeding equipment. We now provide support service that makes the extension of the life cycle of equipment whose production was discontinued over 15 years ago possible by redesigning discontinued parts and restructuring and strengthening our support system including repairs.
We support customers who have difficulty with replacement with newer equipment due to restrictions on change management of equipment specifications or operations, or who hope to continue using their equipment. Through this support, while implementing initiatives that reduce equipment disposal and environmental impact, we contribute to the continuous operation of customers' equipment over a long period of time.
LEAP: Lifecycle Extension and Availability Program
Provision of Best Technical Service with High Added Value
In recent years, there have been increasing calls from customers for us to supply high level support technology for dealing with manufacturing processes that realize scaling and multilayering of semiconductor devices, to further improve productivity, and to reduce environmental impact. To provide Best Technical Service with high added value that responds to these needs, in addition to developing field engineers, we have rolled out Epsira™ DX solutions, supply services that use digital and information and communication technologies, and strive to raise work efficiency.
Work log data for day-to-day service support and various information related to devices are centrally managed on a global scale. To effectively utilize this centrally managed data, we are continuing to develop our data platform and using that platform to introduce various DX tools and enable access from clean rooms.
Field engineers can use various tools to access past examples of troubleshooting, manuals,
work logs, improvement logs, and the like via the data platform. The goal is to accelerate and improve the accuracy of their troubleshooting to provide even faster and higher quality services. We have also rolled out remote support tools for engineers in customer clean rooms. By efficiently analyzing equipment data, we dynamically provide effective support. Through our deployment of Epsira™, we are improving our customers’ productivity.
We provide a wide range of contracted services for the stable operation of equipment, such as services in which our field engineers are stationed at customers’ manufacturing sites to maintain their equipment, as well as a comprehensive contracted service (TEL SERVICE ADVANTAGETM) in which we offer pay-as-you-go or flat-rate maintenance services and we supply maintenance/consumable parts and repairs in an integrated manner. Furthermore, we aggregate and analyze data output from equipment, predict when major parts are likely to fail and suggest replacement in advance so that we can prevent problems, stabilize process capabilities, and help improve our customers’ equipment utilization rates.
Engineer’s Skill Up
In fiscal year 2019, we established our training operations center to enhance the training structure and promote globalization of field engineers. The center establishes a company-wide common skills management system that meets the standards of SEMATECH (a U.S. consortium for the joint development of semiconductors). The system helps us to deploy the most suitable human resources to provide customers with service based on an objective measurement of the skills of our engineers.
In fiscal year 2021, we began providing education for expert engineers to improve the skills of engineers at our overseas subsidiaries. The education includes training programs that enable technical support engineers from overseas to learn not only technical support but also acquire advanced skills related to development in a practical manner at our manufacturing sites in Japan. Furthermore, we also conduct training for field engineers of our Global Data Engineering Team, established in fiscal year 2021, to develop data analysts specializing in digital transformation (DX)*.
In fiscal year 2022, field engineers who have acquired DX skills developed a program for the continuous improvement of business operations and are rolling it out globally. By linking this program to the field information database, it became possible to automatically update, analyze and visualize field information.
Digital transformation:refer to Higher Productivity through Digital Transformation (DX)
