Summary: Re-planning a semiconductor design project is often inevitable as the program is underway. The key to effective, productive re-planning lies in understanding complexity, schedule and resources.

Change is inevitable. Economic factors, mergers and acquisitions, customer specification changes, management and strategy changes all affect project planning and execution. These factors create a need for re-planning IC projects while they are ongoing.

The key to re-planning is the same as for the original planning process: an understanding of complexity, schedule and resources. Numetrics’ NMX-ERP can capture not only the starting characteristics of your design, but also updates as work is completed. This means that at any point during the design, you can calculate the work remaining and the resource and/or schedule implications of that.

Re-planning is simply a process of updating the assumptions based on new information. From there it is a simple process to re-run the analysis, and to generate a new plan. This is easy not only because there is explicit support in the tools for re-planning and the management of multiple scenarios for a single design, but also because there is no need for data re-entry. Everything is built from the original plan, saving a great deal of time for your planners.

Schedule Risk Analyzer generates a comprehensive set of reports that quantitatively assess the underlying schedule risk, given the design’s complexity, staffing assigned to the project and target cycle-time.

The real implication of the re-planning capability is that when a change is proposed, you can quickly determine feasibility. For example, if marketing comes to you and says, “We need samples six weeks early for a key customer,” you can rapidly tell them what that means for resources. If additional resources are not available, you might consider scaling back product features to meet the new schedule. Alternatively, you may be forced to complete the design with fewer engineers than you had originally planned for. In such a case, you can quickly determine the best way to meet your business objectives with the new constraint—either reducing the feature set, or planning for a managed schedule slip.

The net benefit of Numetrics’ re-planning tools is fact-based decision-making in a time of stress. Fact-based planning improves the quality of internal decisions, leading to a healthier business and happier employees. And that can’t be bad.