microelectronics supply chain

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.

In much of post-lockdown China, urban life is humming. The streets of Beijing and Shanghai are bustling with traffic, smog again shrouds city skylines with the resurgence of economic activity, property sales are bouncing back and a revival in consumer confidence is taking hold. Emerging from monthslong shelter-in-place orders, the nation has seized a large measure of control in containing COVID-19 as it breaks fertile new ground in pandemic response and recovery. In Wuhan, Hubei, the fountainhead of the novel coronavirus, one company offers a striking example of China’s muscular COVID-19 containment efforts, carefully continuing to operate through January and February as the virus set root, said Karel Eloot, a Shenzhen-based senior partner and Asia leader of Transformation and Operations practices at McKinsey Company, speaking at a recent webinar presented with SEMI. Soon, COVID-19 spread to eight other provinces that suffered serious outbreaks and forced the nationwide lockdown that sent China’s GDP plunging 7 percent, its first contraction in 28 years. An impressive array of safety protocols, many designed to reduce people density as a bulwark against the virus, animates China’s fight against COVID-19, a return-to-work movement that is laying a path forward for companies around the world. It is these measures, Eloot said, that have kept the Wuhan company afloat and helped other businesses across China restore operations with unusual speed. Community and Social Distancing – The Heart of China’s COVID-19 Response In establishing safeguards, many companies started by assessing staffing requirements, identifying workers essential to sustaining on-site operations while allowing others, such as white-collar staff, to work from home, though some have since returned to their offices. Seen as non-essential, some factory maintenance workers have been instructed to stay home. To fill staffing gaps, business have turned to multi-skilling practices, such as having on-site supervisors and engineers step out of their daily roles to handle lower-level operations activities. Much of the focus has been on community distancing, with businesses quickly identifying workers suffering even minor COVID-19 symptoms and using contact tracing to prevent sick or vulnerable employees from entering offices and factories and turning them into hot zones for community spread, Eloot said. Manufacturing facilities are staggering work shifts to reduce people density, closely monitoring workers’ body temperatures with an eye toward other symptoms, and following up with medical tests and quarantines as needs dictates. QR codes, long a staple of e-commerce, have been a particularly effective weapon in combatting COVID-19. Companies are deployed the scanning technology to identify workers by color code – green, yellow or red – and assign various levels of site access depending on who they’ve been in contact with. Some factory workstations are now walled off by transparent plastic sheeting to prevent COVID-19 infection through aerosol drift. In business meetings and lunchrooms, staffers sit spaced a safe distance apart and facing the same direction to avoid crosscurrents of the microscopic respiratory droplets that can carry the virus. Others eat in isolation. Meeting room windows are opened, weather permitting, to admit fresh air. And elevators – perfect petri dishes for contagion – are shuttered to ward off human clusters, shifting all floor-to-floor movement to staircases. Companies united by the common goal to keep goods flowing through supply chains are providing masks and other personal protective devices to smaller players most vulnerable to the economic shock of COVID-19. The aim: Shield the companies from the potentially crippling effects of the virus to avoid supply chain breakdowns that can undercut the performance of the whole. Even competitors have formed unexpected alliances, sharing parts and components that are in short supply. “Some sectors have maintained steady production throughout the crisis” thanks to these practices, Eloot said. “China has been able to create safe communities where people can operate as normal.” Executive Uncertainty Reigns, Hope Springs Eternal with Innovation The objective of China’s fast, forceful response to the COVID-19 outbreak is economic: A V-shaped rebound after the 7 percent wallop to its GDP in the first quarter of the year. The trajectory is among nine economic recovery scenarios McKinsey Company presented to more than 2,000 executives worldwide in a recent survey seeking their views on the likelihood of each. The business leaders coalesced around two – a full restoration of global GDP growth that could materialize this year or extend into next, or a two- to three-year recovery following the initial economic tsunami, Sven Smit, an Amsterdam-based senior partner with McKinsey and global leader of the McKinsey Global Institute and global COVID-19 response team, said at the webinar. The executives see the multi-year recovery as the most likely. The shorter rebound ranked second on a scale of probabilities. Notably, the business leaders found the V-shaped bounceback China is attempting – returning to GDP growth in one quarter – the least likely outcome. But the biggest surprise from the survey, Smit said, was executives’ view that of the two major global interventions for restoring GDP growth – viral and economic – one will be ineffective, reflecting their deep uncertainty about what lies ahead. A growing body of knowledge about COVID-19 tempers that doubt. It’s established fact that the virus is highly contagious, more lethal than the flu, and spread by means including aerosols and touching contaminated surfaces. But only recently has more insight emerged about human immunity. Broad-based blood testing in the Netherlands has discovered that only 3 percent to 4 percent of the people screened are immune to the coronavirus, leaving the vast majority of the population without natural biological protection – a sweeping vulnerability evident in Asian countries hit early by the virus only to see fresh flare-ups after initial containment. Smit warned of the pandemic’s potential resurgence. Testing has revealed that coronavirus cases are underreported by a staggering 10- to 15-fold, a clarion call that countries “need to be very careful about how they re-open economies.” That means in order to keep COVID-19 at bay until a vaccine is developed, the best defenses will remain temperature monitoring, contact tracing, quarantining, social distancing, mask wearing, frequent hand-washing and other proven protective measures. And while the relative contribution of each safeguard to slowing COVID-19’s spread is unknown, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan and other Asian countries have shown that “if you apply them all, you are likely to keep this virus under control,” Smit said. It remains to be seen whether protections the U.S. and European countries have put in place will stave off the virus as effectively as the rigorous measures implemented by Asian countries and, if the Western regions deploy a different cocktail of safety protocols, how well they will work. The re-opening of their economies promises to reveal the answers – and the McKinsey recovery scenario they’ll face. These and other open questions help explain the uncertainty of the executives McKinsey polled. Pandemic Supercharges, Adds New Urgency to Long-Term Trends What is known is that, far from upending the way all organizations operate, COVID-19 is supercharging secular trends and showing that people can react with dizzying velocity when confronting global mortal threats. That speed, Smit said, “is not determined by the potential of technology, but by events." For decades, doctors and technologists have teamed to develop ways to examine and treat people from afar, yet telemedicine managed to eke out only small, incremental gains in adoption. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, patients have flocked online, with virtual doctor’s visits accounting for more than 70 percent of all physician-patient interactions. “People like it, and we can reach many more patients as a result. It happened in a few weeks,” Smit said. Similarly, teachers and unions have only inched toward digital communications for years, fearing job losses in education at the hands of technology. When schools closed recently under shelter-in-place orders, teachers quickly switched to online lessons. The transition, Smit said, took one weekend. Meanwhile, as office workers holed up at home, usage of teleconferencing applications skyrocketed. “We’re collectively learning at unprecedented speed,” Smit said. “We’re sharing. We’re learning about supply chains. We’re learning about collaboration. We’re learning about masks. We’re learning about contact tracing. We’re learning how to work more efficiently. We’re learning from real-time data about the behavior of people. And we’re investing collectively enormous sums in finding cures and treatments and expanding hospital capacity.” While the coronavirus’s blistering spread caught many countries off-guard, Smit expects scientists to spare no effort to innovate. Expressing hope that new medical interventions will be available by summer, Smit said the world needs to buttress its key lines of defense against the coronavirus until a vaccine is developed – a shield that will quicken the global economic recovery. “The race is on," he said. Related blog COVID-19: Economic and Microelectronics Industry Impacts – Insights from McKinsey Company For McKinsey’s latest insights on the coronavirus pandemic, visit its website, which is updated daily. For the latest COVID-19 information and SEMI event updates SEMI is providing members, visit Coronavirus Resources. Michael Hall is a marketing communications manager at SEMI.