business continuity

Now, more than ever, semiconductor companies are relying on their human resources departments to ensure employee safety, support facility access and hygiene measures, cope with staffing demands and incorporate the rapidly evolving guidelines from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the local state and city mandates. SEMI spoke with Crystal Reich, HR manager at X-FAB Texas, about her participation in the Fab Owners Alliance (FOA) human resources group and the value of collaborating with industry peers on a broad spectrum of topics: from focusing on specific areas such as ensuring employee safety and managing the workforce during a pandemic, to addressing broader organizational challenges such as benchmarking activities and identifying compensation and staffing best practices. SEMI: How did you learn about the FOA human resources group? Reich: I have been part of the FOA HR group since its inception in 2012. Lloyd Whetzel, the CEO at X-FAB Texas, has been very involved with the FOA for several years. When this group was being formed, he let me know about it. I came to the first meeting and have been a part of it ever since. SEMI: What does your participation in the FOA human resources group allow you and your company to do differently? Reich: I am also involved with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), but the FOA HR group provides an excellent opportunity for semiconductor industry HR professionals to collaborate. The group not only covers topics that are specific to the semiconductor industry but also discusses broader topics related to preserving employee well-being during unprecedented challenging times, managing negative emotions, establishing appropriate political expression policies, and creating safe spaces for dialogue. Also, the benchmarking has been fantastic, especially from a compensation and staffing standpoint. It allows us to identify best-in-class recruitment strategies, determine any shortfalls and use this information to improve employee onboarding and development. In addition to discussing these types of issues and trends, we compare and benchmark other HR issues such as policy deployment and legislative trends with colleagues in the industry. SEMI: What are some of the key topics and activities that the FOA HR group has helped you focus on? Reich: X-FAB has been involved in a variety of activities at SEMI. Through the SEMI High Tech U program, we have been able to help college-bound high school students in our community access STEM curriculum and explore careers in technology. We have devised more robust military outreach strategies with the help of the Veterans Program at SEMI, allowing us to recruit and retain excellent technicians from the military. Additionally, benchmarking activities within the FOA HR group have helped us improve our talent acquisition process - especially for positions which are challenging to fill. SEMI: The pandemic brought many significant and unprecedented challenges that affected business continuity. How did your company's participation in the FOA help you navigate these changes? Reich: The FOA has been a great help in addressing the challenges of the global pandemic across several operational collaborative teams. In the early days of the pandemic, as employees moved to remote work, FOA organized a forum that allowed members to share how they dealt with this transition. Constantly changing guidelines and protocols meant that FOA members leaned on each other more than ever to share best practices and lessons from new safety process implementations. FOA offered survey and area-specific team activities, cross-functional operational sessions, and round table discussions at its 2020 Q4 meeting, where members exchanged ideas on how business processes changed during this period and shared what they were doing to ensure business continuity. This provided another excellent opportunity for FOA members to benchmark best practices within the semiconductor industry. SEMI: Would you recommend your peers to join the FOA HR group? Reich: I would highly recommend HR colleagues in the semiconductor industry join this collaborative group. It is a great platform to share ideas, learn from each other, and benchmark with other colleagues in the same industry. The FOA HR Metrics survey is a comprehensive survey covering several different areas within the HR discipline such as compensation, learning and development, tool training, corporate social responsibility, and many others. True to the nature of the FOA, the survey is a result of the collaboration between several HR professionals from Device Maker member companies. Please contact Shilpa Talwalkar at [email protected] if you would like to participate. X-FAB is a member of the SEMI Fab Owners Alliance, an international group of semiconductor and MEMS fab managers and industry suppliers that meet regularly to solve common non-competitive manufacturing issues and improve their business results. Nishita Rao is senior product marketing manager at SEMI.

As the COVID-19 quarantine-related restrictions for commerce and transportation are lifted in the Philippines, companies are dusting off desks, cleaning coffee mugs, warming up equipment and gradually bringing back staff to resume full operations. Of primary interest to manufacturing companies like Microchip Technology Philippines are the restrictions on the allowable workforce, the movement of personnel, transportation, and health and safety protocols affecting factory staffing, materials availability, and the ability to ship products. In the Philippines, these restrictions started to scale back in mid-May and are staged to continue in a series of continuing reductions every two weeks through the end of June. As business operations recover, challenges remain in managing the workforce, negotiating the supply chain and understanding the expenses required to operate under the “new norm” while Business Continuity Plans continue to be reviewed and revised.Here are some of the more important business-related elements of the quarantine levels enacted by the Philippines:Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ): In effect from March 17 through May 15, 2020, this was the initial lockdown with the strictest requirements, most notably requiring the general population to stay at home, imposing curfews, prohibiting all public gatherings including schools, halting public transportation and banning air travel while allowing cargo flights, skeletal workforces (~15%) for essential businesses (BPOs, IT and exporters, for example) and travel using some private vehicles with varying types of passes required to clear checkpoints.Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ): In effect from May 16 through May 31, 2020, this was the first stage to ease control to allow up to 50% of employees to return to work at essential businesses. The easing also allowed gatherings of up to five people while maintaining most other restrictions.General Community Quarantine (GCQ): In effect from June 1 through June 15, 2020, essential businesses are allowed to resume full operations within health and safety protocols in place for physical distancing, disinfection and the wearing of Personal Protection equipment (PPE). Air travel is allowed to resume while public transportation remains restricted until June 21, 2020. Company shuttles are allowed for point-to-point services.Modified General Community Quarantine (MGCQ): Planned for June 16 through June 30, 2020, this is the transition phase to the “new normal,” which will continue easing the restrictions for contact-related businesses such as barbershops, salons, restaurants and the like. Movement and public transportation will remain restricted until June 22, at which point the last obstacle for businesses to fully resume operations will fall.While some larger companies during the most restrictive ECQ were able to house staff on site or nearby in skeletal crews, some smaller companies were unable to do so and may never recover from the loss in revenue or from the loss of employees. The majority of companies in the technoparks shut down under the ECQ and were rendered powerless to return workers to factories. For factories allowed to house employees on site, a huge effort was required to provide emergency transportation, accommodations, food and drinking water, toiletries, Wi-Fi, and even entertainment for the sequestered staff – all while maintaining health and safety protocols for physical distancing and disinfection. For example, Microchip Technology Philippines was able to build temporary sleeping cubicles and showers; to buy tents, foam mattresses, bedding and personal hygiene kits; to provide canteen and laundry services; and to allow Wi-Fi access for employees to stay connected to family and friends.Microchip Technology’s 11 Guiding Values help to define our corporate culture and guide our decision-making. One key Guiding Value on display as we’ve transitioned through the levels of quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been that Employees Are Our Greatest Strength. Exercising this Guiding Value has supported the expenses necessary to provide the safest, most comfortable living accommodations in the factory conference rooms, hallways, basement, and even in office cubicles.While many larger companies in the Philippines provide company shuttles at pre-established pick-up points, limited public transportation strands many workers at home with no way to reach to their assigned shuttle. To address this challenge, solutions including van brigades that can navigate narrow village streets to pick up workers should be considered though at an additional, unplanned expense. The physical distancing rules effectively halves the number of riders, which in turn requires a doubling of the shuttle buses, most of which are under lease. If shuttle bus leasing companies cannot provide more buses, employees who can work from home should continue to do so or drive to shuttle stops if they have personal vehicles. Leasing these additional shuttle buses was in no company’s budget as we began 2020.Additional measures under the new norm will be expensive – perhaps prohibitively so – for smaller companies that cannot afford to double the number of company transports due to physical spacing rules requiring them to halve workplace capacity, whose workplace environments cannot support physical distancing, and whose treasuries cannot afford to buy rapid test kits for employees and their families. If these smaller companies produce items critical to the supply chain, larger companies will feel the sting – and cease producing specific products during the qualification of an alternate supplier. Until the Bureau of Customs and staffing of third-party logistic providers is back to normal, and until ports are running at full force, materials and exports will continue to be delayed, potentially limiting the number of employees needed to return to work to run production.It has been very expensive for companies to survive through these levels of quarantine while keeping factories and employees in a state of readiness to return to work. Additional expenses will be borne for compliance to the new norm. As many businesses recover under the new norm, they’ll undoubtedly take a closer look at their business continuity planning, if any such plans exist, and if not, they should be created without hesitation.The problem with a typical business continuity plan is it tends to focus on one or a few concurrent major events – say, flooding or a power failure due to a typhoon – but it’s doubtful any plan took into account a global pandemic that affected so many factors simultaneously including workforces, supply chains, transportation, logistics and food supplies. As we return to work, we’ll have to adjust to the new workplace and embed the lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic into our business continuity plans. And, hopefully, we’ll never have to exercise those measures again.Greg Fisher is Managing Director at Microchip Technology Philippines.

Olivier Corvez, senior manager of Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability at SEMI, sat down (virtually) with Todd Patterson, vice president of global EHS for Entegris Global Operations, to discuss how Entegris has responded to the global pandemic.Corvez manages and Patterson participates in the COVID-19 EHS Task Force currently meeting weekly to discuss industry response and share best practices. SEMI: Was Entegris prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic? How did the company respond?Patterson: Entegris has a strong risk management framework and a risk assessment team of senior leaders who meet at least once a quarter. This focus gives us early visibility into events that could destabilize our organization or threaten our operations. Such a framework helps ensure we have the information necessary to act as soon as possible when the need arises. However, our business continuity plans for a pandemic of this scale were far less than with other more commonly occurring catastrophic events such as earthquakes or hurricanes. The COVID-19 crisis was clearly unprecedented and as such, the necessary systems and procedures were not in place with the depth and detail needed. Our strong governance structure made it possible for us to hold steady even as the pandemic caused increasing uncertainty and disruption around the world. For example, despite major supply chain shutdowns across many industries, to date, our supply chain and manufacturing operations have only been modestly impacted by COVID-19. Our supply chain team was assessing daily the areas of risk with our suppliers and taking appropriate action as well as preemptive steps to ensure our critical supply lines remained open.Our sales team engaged in regular communications with our customers providing them updates about our Business Continuity Plans and our actions to mitigate the risk to any of their deliveries. In addition, we maintained current information about the continuity of our supply chain on the company’s intranet for the global sales team to access as they engaged with customers. Also, a proactive communication plan was implemented immediately to send weekly video messages from senior executives directly to employees’ emails. It was an effective way to communicate with our global teams, to keep them informed about the status of the company’s operations and maintain a common sense of purpose at a time when many colleagues worked from home. In these weekly messages, we also focused significant attention on the health and safety protocols established to protect our manufacturing and lab employees from the virus.Among the health and safety protocols we implemented immediately as the virus moved across different regions were those related to facility screenings, work-from-home policies, social distancing, self-quarantine requirements, contact tracing, increased disinfecting, and travel restrictions. With approximately 5,300 employees worldwide, we had teams in every region ready to implement these comprehensive protocols. We believe we were among the first companies to implement work-from-home policies and travel restrictions.Temperature screening stations at Entegris facilities in Jangan, Korea (left) and Kulim, Malaysia (right). In addition, our CEO led a COVID-19 Steering Committee comprised of senior executives and managers from operations, human resources and communications. The committee met several times a week during March and April to evaluate and formulate responses to the issues that emerged as the virus spread from region to region. The committee’s work created a strong partnership among senior executives and divisional and functional leaders, and the initial guidelines developed by the committee have formed the backbone of a global playbook to limit the spread of the virus to our other sites around the world.Recently, the committee has changed its focus to more strategic issues such as creating a framework for transitioning remote workers back into our office locations. Meanwhile, local leadership teams at each of our global sites have been empowered to address ongoing tactical issues consistent with our thoroughly documented health and safety protocols.Looking to the future, we are using our experience in responding to COVID-19 to develop a more comprehensive pandemic response plan. We have project teams working on better ways to: measure temperatures of personnel entering our sites facilitate social distancing in the workplace redesign common use areas to reduce the number of high touch points disinfect all spaces thoroughly and regularly, and manage emergency pandemic supplies. SEMI: From the SEMI EHS survey, we noted that all members had a Business Continuity Plan. How effective has it been for deploying resources and adapting quickly and minimizing the crisis? Why or why not? Patterson: Because we have operations in China, Entegris experienced the impact of the virus immediately. We quickly formed two task force teams for our two primary facilities in the region. These teams developed the means for communicating key information to employees and started working on prevention plans to protect employees and comply with local requirements for when operations resumed. They met the challenges head on and found quick solutions. An example was finding an effective way of communicating to the employees for each location. Group chats were established through social media. It was this work that led to their success in getting approvals from local authorities to resume operations. Those plans have laid the groundwork on which our other sites around the world could build their response plans.The effective management of our global supply chain also stands out as a key success of the company’s Business Continuity Plan. Entegris has a highly complex supply chain with approximately 6,500 suppliers and a $850 million annual spend, and we ship work-in-progress and finished goods from over 90 sites globally.As I mentioned earlier, despite the virus crippling supply chains across many industries, Entegris experienced very little disruption to its supply chain. The supply chain team was able to accomplish this despite a 90% reduction in global freight capacity. A key factor in keeping goods flowing to our factories was the intensive work the team had done earlier to develop an in-depth understanding of the company’s top suppliers and to mitigate sourcing risks. They had established alternate sources, balanced the sources geographically, and placed inventory across our supply chain to buffer risk.The team also had integrated statistical modeling into reporting tools, which made it possible to reset safety stocks and logistics lead times quickly as conditions changed. And a supply chain digitalization provided one aligned and integrated view via dashboards, giving the company the ability to respond rapidly and to communicate in real time with our suppliers. We essentially had a virtual war room where we monitored the daily impact of the spread of the virus and could address bottlenecks and other issues immediately.SEMI: What lessons have been learned, so far? How do you see changes in your company’s operations in the future?Patterson: Institutionalizing what we’ve learned has already begun. Whether the measures implemented during the pandemic are temporary or become permanent is still to be determined. Regardless, the learnings need to be documented and available as a playbook for if – or when – the next pandemic occurs.Entegris is already working on a more comprehensive pandemic plan that will be based on five levels of preparedness. Level 0 will cover annual training requirements and management of emergency inventory of pandemic supplies. Level 1 will include early recognition of an outbreak, and then Levels 2-4 will include requirements for when specific response measures are implemented. Entegris also has formed the “New Normal” task force, which consists of leaders representing a number of disciplines directing the project teams previously mentioned to create a more comprehensive pandemic response plan. One of the project teams is working on improving the facility screening process that performs temperature measurement for personnel entering Entegris sites. The team is looking at the best technology to scan body temperature. As to whether this technology is employed only while COVID-19 is still active or becomes a permanent way of doing business, this is still being discussed.SEMI: EHS is involved in both providing technical support to protect individuals but also in making organizational changes to favorize social distancing. Could you explain some of the successes and challenges while tackling these two fronts?Patterson: Very early in the pandemic, Entegris established a work-from-home policy for non-essential employees. This significantly reduced the number of personnel and the potential for contact at the Entegris locations. Significant facility changes also were required. These included the design of facility screening booths and modifications to common gathering areas such as canteens, meeting rooms, prayer rooms, and smoking points. Physical markings were used to designate 2 meters distancing, and the seating in canteens and meeting rooms was reduced and staggered to minimize the risk of exposure to the virus. Entegris also has a project team focused on developing design solutions for offices and workstations when space makes it difficult to maintain 2 meters social distancing. These changes turned out to be essential for some sites in meeting mandates by local authorities. Our sites in Hangzhou, China and Kulim, Malaysia both were allowed to resume partial operations after demonstrating to government authorities the effectiveness of the preventative measures put in place. One particular challenge we are facing is the range of personal differences and awareness levels within the workforce – including those that don’t understand the importance of the new guidelines. We are working closely in advising supervisory staff to be aware of the need for employees to follow all health and safety protocols we have put in place, including social distancing. That preventative measure is the most difficult to make part of our new behavior – it is unnatural and inconsistent with our human nature, but it is critical to preventing the further spread of the virus.SEMI: How do you envision the progressive steps in deescalating to bring back “normal” operations? Patterson: I don’t know whether Entegris will ever go back to the old “normal.” As previously mentioned, we are working on the “New Normal.” Our focus now is on bringing our work-from-home employees back to the workplace without adding risk of exposure to the virus. We are still exploring options, but we expect to do it in a phased approach so that we can adequately assess the preventive measures that are in place and determine whether adjustments need to be made to any of our health and safety protocols.We are starting to see a variety of different frameworks emerge for evaluating repopulation timing and procedures. We will assess them on an office-by-office, or site-by-site basis, utilizing consistent criteria to define the potential for exposure to the virus. This also applies to our field service workforce. However, I have not yet seen any governmental guidance that offers a recommended framework for returning employees to the workplace. I think this represents an opportunity for SEMI EHS and the Standards groups to work to establish that framework for our industry.SEMI: Anything else you would like to share that you have observed throughout this crisis?We have not discussed the challenges faced in procuring and acquiring pandemic supplies. Almost immediately after the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, it became increasingly difficult to find supplies. Even when confirmation was provided by suppliers and delivery dates confirmed, the majority of the dates were pushed out or canceled. We found that what worked best was to have purchasing teams at the local site work with their local contacts on obtaining smaller quantities while a corporate point person was also managing larger orders. In preparation for any future pandemics, Entegris will be maintaining an emergency inventory for masks, sanitizer, thermometers, and disinfectants.For 18 months, Todd Patterson has held the position of VP Global EHS for Entegris Global Operations. His experience with emergency management and BCP has become invaluable in the past three months. He is grateful to his global response teams around the world for coming together to support the Entegris team in this unprecedented situation. Todd is an active participant on the SEMI EHS COVID-19 response teams led by Olivier Corvez at SEMI. Olivier Corvez is senior manager of Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability at SEMI.