Multi-Project Pipelining

Semiconductor development organizations typically have multiple IC projects in various stages of development and no means for quickly determining whether they have sufficient numbers of each required skill set to meet the demands of all of them. Numetrics’ solution (NMX Multi-Project Pipeliner™) assesses the collective staffing demand and utilization for any number of projects.

With the Numetrics solution, managers can:

  • Quickly spot oversubscription of critical resources
  • Prioritize project execution sequence
  • Observe the impact on resource consumption.

 

Once the manager defines the execution prioritization, the algorithms automatically sequence project execution in accordance with that prioritization. They shift each project’s start date to the earliest possible point in time in which headcount oversubscriptions are eliminated. They remove all oversubscription violations by adjusting execution sequence according to the time-to-market priorities set by the manager. This multi-project, resource-leveling solution enables users to ensure that peak resource consumption within a given period does not exceed staffing availability of key roles.

Figures 1, 2, and 3 (below) illustrate three views from the Numetrics pipelining solution that managers overseeing multiple projects use to determine whether available staffing meets projected demand.

  1. First, they generate staffing estimates for each project using IC Project Planner.
  2. Next, the estimates are seamlessly imported into the tool (Figure 1)
  3. The tool then graphically displays both the total headcount all projects consume (Figure 2) and the utilization of each particular role (Figure 3).

Most importantly, this process occurs far in advance of the availability of detailed bottom-up project plans, yet provides reliable, early estimates of the total staffing needed for an IC business line’s project portfolio.

Figure 1. Numetrics’ multi-project pipelining solution provides a graphical view of the staffing profiles generated by IC Project Planner, which illustrates the resource demand of each project. FTE = Full Time Equivalent Person.

Figure 2. Numetrics’ multi-project pipelining solution sums of the demand of all projects in the execution pipeline (shown in Figure 1) and simultaneously displays the total available staffing horizontal line). In this example, demand exceeds availability starting in 2008 and continuing until 2009.

Figure 3. Numetrics’ multi-project pipelining solution generates a table displaying total utilization of each role for all projects in the execution pipeline (Figures 1 & 2) on monthly basis.