Organizational restructuring of test engineering to cope with HGA manufacturing requirement at Seagate Technology, Teparuk

Abstract

Test Engineering organization, a multi-function technical organization, had experienced a significant growth in the past 4 years corresponding to technical requirements in HGA manufacturing for rigid disk drive. The organization had difficulties in sustaining quality of its product delivered to manufacturing. Engineers were struggling with broad range of their responsibility causing lack of technical development to master test related technology. Gap of communication between engineer and frontline people kept increasing due to improper time and priority allocation on data analysis. Customer-focused structure and organization-framework were introduced incorporated with understanding core product and internal customers. vision and mission were established to formulate functional objective goals as well as building organizational awareness into employee. Common goals setting for multiple groups were used to create teamwork environment. Cross-functional workflow is established to focus on process not a task in order to improve process ownership among focused-groups within the organization. IS/IT were deployed to leverage organization capability. Improvement was observed in speed of reaction on technical issues in manufacturing, including effective monitoring and advanced engineering analysis. Knowledge bases and computer-based training were also developed to handle technical training. Investment in IS/IT was relatively low compared to significant improvement in several aspects, with a return on investment less than one year.