CAPA – or Corrective and Preventive Actions is a widely used business concept across all industries. It is a central concept of ISO standards and good manufacturing practices. The CAPA process essentially describe a set of steps undertaken to improve work processes and minimize risk as well as mitigating the occurrence and recurrence of nonconformances. It can drive dramatic improvements in product compliance. In high-tech industries and specifically in semiconductor related manufacturing, all processes have to be under control. Therefore, CAPA is referred to as OCAP – or Out of Control Action Plan. It describes shop floor level guiding rules to be observed if product non-conformance is detected or excursion (when a process or a tool shifts out of control or specification limits) occurs. Operators, technicians, and engineers will then systematically collect and follow
OCAP on re-occurrence typically starting with a root cause analysis.
This whitepaper introduces the challenges, the requirements, and a solution approach to drastically reduce OCAP execution time by up to 300% and to shorten tool down time associated with OCAP by a factor of two having automated OCAP steps, designing new OCAPs, and rolling them out to production within one day.