The effect of Total Productive Management practices on manufacturing performance through SECS/GEM Standard for electronic contract manufacturing companies (TOC, Abstract, chapter 1 and Reference only)

In an environment of intense global competition, it pays to consider both creative and proven systems that can be used to bring about effective and efficient manufacturing operation. Many electronic contract manufacturing companies have put forth huge amounts of effort and resources to achieve precise and reliable measurement of equipment performance. The objective of a concise measurement is to optimise this piece of asset for every dollar invested. However, it has failed on numerous attempts to achieve the desirable result due to hardware limitations, low degrees of data accuracy and the need for manual intervention. Integrating Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) methodology with SEMI Equipment Communication Standard (SECS) with Generic Equipment Model (GEM) enables data acquisition in a concise manner and keeps track of all real-time transactions that have taken place between the operator and the equipment. To achieve this integration process, a fast-track TPM implementation approach is required by re-engineering the TPM implementation process. The Re-Engineered TPM approach comprises of three TPM pillars (Asset Productivity (AP), Autonomous Maintenance (AM) and Planned Maintenance (PM)) instead of the original eight pillars. Apart from three TPM pillars, also included are SECS/GEM standard, direct and indirect labour utilisation hours, material and overhead cost. The main objective of this study is to determine whether the re-engineering effort, based on these three TPM pillars, SECS/GEM standard together with labour and cost, are able to minimise losses in production process and have positive impact on Output (Manufacturing Performance). The study also aims at evaluating whether the SECS/GEM standard integration with Autonomous Maintenance has the capability of real-time monitoring equipment performance on the production floor. Furthermore, the study aims to assess the impact on productivity, namely, the Output (Manufacturing Performance). The three years, monthly data for the study was collected from ten Electronic Contract Manufacturing (ECM) companies in Johor, Malaysia. The data was analysed through descriptive statistics, regression analysis and panel data analysis. Based on the panel data analysis, the Hausman Test revealed that the Fixed Effects model was found to be the optimal model for this study. The result shows that six independent variables were significant, while one independent variable was not. The insignificant independent variable was SECS/GEM standard integration with Autonomous Maintenance. Further analysis was conducted through a qualitative study. The additional analysis shows that ECM companies do not fully understand the possible application of the SECS/GEM standard integration with Autonomous Maintenance in their manufacturing environment. Therefore, minimum effort was deployed by ECM companies in incorporating this standard into their equipment maintenance platform. However, these days many ECM companies have started to purchase equipment with SECS/GEM standard in order to facilitate smoother future integration with Autonomous Maintenance or with other TPM pillars. This total integration of TPM (three pillars), SECS/GEM standard, labour and cost provides an avenue to monitor and address the operational losses in the production equipment in a timely manner. This system paves the way to improving Output (Manufacturing Performance)

qPOTS: Efficient batch multiobjective Bayesian optimization via Pareto optimal Thompson sampling

Classical evolutionary approaches for multiobjective optimization are quite effective but incur a lot of queries to the objectives; this can be prohibitive when objectives are expensive oracles. A sample-efficient approach to solving multiobjective optimization is via Gaussian process (GP) surrogates and Bayesian optimization (BO). Multiobjective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) involves the construction of an acquisition function which is optimized to acquire new observation candidates. This ``inner'' optimization can be hard due to various reasons: acquisition functions being nonconvex, nondifferentiable and/or unavailable in analytical form; the success of MOBO heavily relies on this inner optimization. We do away with this hard acquisition function optimization step and propose a simple, but effective, Thompson sampling based approach ($q\texttt{POTS}$) where new candidate(s) are chosen from the Pareto frontier of random GP posterior sample paths obtained by solving a much cheaper multiobjective optimization problem. To further improve computational tractability in higher dimensions we propose an automated active set of candidates selection combined with a Nystr\"{o}m approximation. Our approach applies to arbitrary GP prior assumptions and demonstrates strong empirical performance over the state of the art, both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency, on synthetic as well as real-world experiments.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

(Re-)Negotiating Gender and Class:New Forms of Cooperation Among Small-Scale Fishers in Tamil Nadu

This paper explores new forms of cooperation emerging among small-scale fishers along the east coast of Tamil Nadu, as responses to wider transformations in fisheries and coastal landscapes. Increase in competition for limited open access resources has resulted in a capitalization of fisheries, with those able to invest reaping benefits and others risking marginalization. In order to retain their status as fishers rather than labourers, and gain a voice in decision-making structures, dominated by the traditional elites, many small-scale fishers have been experimenting with new forms of cooperation involving the shared ownership of large boats, engines and other modern technologies. In the process, one finds shifts in class, caste, gender and generational roles, relations and identities. Based on data collected from a survey of 200 households and in-depth interviews with 20 households in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, we explore the processes of negotiation and renegotiation of both gender and class identities, and their intersections. How are new institutional practices and forms of cooperation (and conflict) enabling a more equitable sharing of resources and benefits, and in which ways are they further entrenching inequalities

Fluidised Bed Heat Treatment - A Flexible Heat Treating Technology

For heat treatment of metal parts wide variety of furnaces are employed. Protective atmosphere furnaces like sealed quench furnace, vaccum furnaces, pit type retort, rotary retort furnaces and salt bath furnaces are used for heat treatment processes. In recent years flui-dised bed furnaces are gaining popularity due to certain inherent advantages associated with them. Almost all the processes such as neutral hardening, carburising, carbon-itriding, annealing, nitriding nitrocarburising etc. can be carried out with a single fluidised bed furnace inst-allation. Added to this flexibility bed temperature uni-formity, quick change over of atmospheres, fast rate of heat transfer and bed buoyancy results in predictable and consistent results in properties and dimensions after heat treatment