When analyzing the current development practices several challenges and issues can be found as recurring patterns. The below list is a collection of issues which were found in more than one organization categorized into different areas:

• Market issues
  • Time to market concerns / reducing market windows
  • Increasing costs for fabs and process developments –> increased need for collaboration –> increased problems with sharing / porting
  • Pure blue book / engineer process transfer
  • Multi-site collaboration needs
• Limited virtual development / verification issues
  • Mostly real life / time + cost intensive experimentation
  • Sometimes limited use of structure simulation capabilities even in early stages
  • Simulation experts have limited bandwidth; collaboration with process engineers sometimes difficult
  • Often Difficult, not centralized simulation tool setup
  • Problems Equipment damage / contamination by wrong recipe
  • Sometimes useless results by overseen recipe error e.g. decimal point wrong
• Knowledge access issues
  • Questions like „Once we had a result …“
  • Often paper based engineering note books
  • One sorting criteria on a file server
  • Different documentation formats per engineer
  • Cluttered result storage
    • Results on local disks
    • Limited capabilities for file versioning
    • Time consuming / error prone data collection
  • Limited data relations –> limited information –> limited knowledge
  • Open development data loop
  • Engineer fluctuation issues per project / company wide
  • New employees flooded with unstructured data
  • Double engineering between
    • Neighbor engineers
    • Multiple-site developments
• Transparency issues
  • Development / WIP status unclear
  • Development planning data bases limited
  • Reporting time consuming and has limited timeliness´
  • CMMI / ISO 900X / SOX compliance issues

All these challenges are mitigated with the usage of a Process Development Execution System (PDES). Read more on the this type of systems