The global services division of our customer is desirous of setting up a product support team for the first time in India for their older generation 200mm Etch, CVD and PVD tool customers in the APAC region. This move was driven by the need for cost-effective product support and swift turnarounds in issue resolution. Our customer turned to us for support after considering our rich expertise in the semiconductor equipment manufacturing domain. Also, past engagements told them that associating with Mindteck was risk-free.

Mindteck Center of Excellence in Semiconductor Manufacturing quickly ramped up a team of 5 engineers within 6 weeks of receiving the project offer. Project plans were developed detailing all activities, dependencies, risks and corresponding mitigation plans. The mitigation plans centered on training the product support teams in the US and ensuring their productivity once they returned to India. Our teams proactively worked with the customer to devise a knowledge management system to retain product knowledge within teams. They also tracked risks and mitigated them on a continuous basis. In product support, we set up metrics and collected, tracked and categorized customer issue data.

Our progressive SLAs based on the team’s maturity levels helped to set customer expectations.

Three months down the line, our teams ramped up for both the process and the product. Within a year of operations the teams had gained sufficient maturity on the product to provide onsite FAB level support at customer fab locations.

In a specific issue Product support team exceeded the customers expectation by resolving a productivity related critical issue related to MP ultra Brooks robot operation used in the tool. Experts from Santa Clara were unable to root cause the problem. Solving this issue led to lot of retrofit orders from Intel for our customer.

Apart from cost arbitrage, our customer benefited from:

	Product support teams that were productive within 3 months of training
	50% customer issue resolutions within 6 months of training
	91% customer issues resolutions within 18 months of training
	Support for a wide tool base of 200mm tools software for multiple products within a year of operation
	Heightened responsiveness due to our proximity to the APAC region
	Product support engineers who doubled as field support engineers at customer locations at FABs, wherever required; Fulltime support for 200mm tools onsite by the customer’s local field support engineers was eliminated