[labnetwork] Equipment reservation efficiencies

Mon Jul 17 15:57:22 EDT 2017

Hi John,

Thanks very much for piping in.

You’re of course correct about my error. We’re running Badger and the equipment reservation efficiency report in question was for the period 2017-07-04 to 2017-07-13 which translates to a 10 day period rather than the 7 days I mentioned in my email. Sorry about that.

Since we’re running Badger you already know that we do have the ability to make tool-specific reservation rules. Right now, this particular tool has a 14-day reservation horizon, a 3hr maximum single reservation duration and a 12hr total reservation maximum for the 14-day horizon.  We’ve thought about tweaking these  but I was curious to hear what others in the community might be doing before heading in that direction.

Along the same lines, the good folks at Badger have recently created a new “fair play protocol” for us that reduces the total 14-day reservation horizon for a tool on a per-user basis based on their behaviour. Specifically, anyone who does not cancel an unneeded reservation within the 24 hour grace period will see their 14-day reservation horizon maximum reduced by the duration of the cancelled reservation(s). We recently rolled out this new protocol on another single tool but have not yet accumulated enough data to extract anything meaningful as of yet. Maybe this will be the way to go with the evaporator as well if we see an improvement on this other tool (e-beam litho system). Time will tell.

Thanks again for sharing your insights. Always appreciated.

Best,
Vito

From: John D Shott <shott at stanford.edu<mailto:shott at stanford.edu>>
Date: Friday, July 14, 2017 at 9:07 PM
To: Vito Logiudice <vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca>>
Cc: "labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu<mailto:labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu>" <labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu<mailto:labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu>>
Subject: Re: [labnetwork] Equipment reservation efficiencies

Vito:

As I no longer am a practicing engineer, you are welcome to take my comments with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, I do have some comments based on prior experience with this topic.

For starters, since 7x24 = 168 hours, if your evaporator was reserved for 192 hours in a week you have a different problem …

Nonetheless, my guess is that many folks see "reservation challenges" on their high-demand tools. When a tool is used a lot, I think that folks begin to grab reservation time just in case they need it.

I don't know what reservation system you run, but do you have the ability to make tool-specific reservation rules?If so, things that can help include tinkering with the reservation horizon (how far in advance a reservation can be made), maximum duration of one or all reservations over that horizon, maximum number of reservations for a single user over that horizon, etc.

Can you track when reservations were made and deleted in addition to the period for which the reservation was made?  If so, I expect that you will see evidence of a "feeding frenzy" … many reservations are snapped up as far in the future as legally allowed by your policies/software. We have seen the use of keystroke automation tools to snap up a reservation the second that a new time slot became available. Even if you don't intend to use it, having reservations on a high-demand tool can be a useful bartering tool in many lab economies.  You and your reservation policies need to help your users NOT get caught up in reservation gaming …

What is your reservation deletion/cancellation policy … or are people simply failing to cancel reservations?  Along these lines, a frequent suggestion is to "charge them for unused reservations". While that is easy to say, I have yet to see a reliable, automated means of determining that a reservation was not used. What is the evaporator was down? What if an upstream tool was down? What if, …

Your lab users are smart: have they found a way to actually use the tool for longer than their usage records indicate?  That becomes a question of what is actually interlocked on the tool, but if you interlock cooling water or things that affect only the actual evaporation, for example, your users likely know that and may not be paying for all of their actual equipment time.

Of course, in a university research lab, a tool that is actually used more than 50% of the time should probable place that tool quite high on our "we'd like another X" list.

I certainly expect to see a lively discussion of this topic …

Have a good weekend,

John

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 14, 2017, at 4:53 PM, Vito Logiudice <vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca>> wrote:

Dear Colleagues,

We have struggled for some time now with equipment reservations which tend to be much greater than equipment use times. This is especially problematic on some of our most popular tools.

For instance, records for the past 7 day period show an enable (or use) time for our popular e-beam evaporator of 86 hours while the tool was reserved for a total of 192 hours during this period. This translates into a tool reservation efficiency of 45%; this seems very poor to me.

I can appreciate that it can be difficult to estimate how much time one might need on any given tool. However, I’m inclined to think that a robust and well-maintained tool with well understood and documented processes (as is the case for this particular deposition system) should allow our membership to plan their work accurately enough so that the tool’s reservation efficiency should remain consistently above 75% or so.

If this is a parameter that you happen track for your operations, I would appreciate hearing what your typical reservation efficiency range might be for some of your most popular tools. I would also appreciate hearing your thoughts on what you might have done in the past to improve this performance parameter for these particularly popular tools.

Thank you for any insights. All feedback is welcome.

Best regards,
Vito
--
Vito Logiudice  MASc, P.Eng.
Director, Quantum NanoFab
University of Waterloo
Lazaridis QNC 1207
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON           Canada N2L 3G1
Tel.: (519) 888-4567  ext. 38703
Email: vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca>
Website: https://fab.qnc.uwaterloo.ca

_______________________________________________
labnetwork mailing list
labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu<mailto:labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu>
https://www-mtl.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo.cgi/labnetwork
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mtl.mit.edu/pipermail/labnetwork/attachments/20170717/2dffc561/attachment.html>