Automation of Cross-Factory Decision-Making Within Administrative Processes to Enhance Data Quality for Production

The efforts for digitalization and automation of manufacturing processes led to a neglected increase in manual administrative work tasks. Globalization, diversified supply chains, and the trend towards single-digit lot sizes add further complexity to administrative tasks and render a manual execution ineffective. Automation is a vital step for industries to stay competitive, but the path to it is not trivial. An in-depth analysis, optimization, and reengineering of old process flows is necessary to achieve the full optimization potential of automation activities. In this research, we indicate our approach that uses BPMN to standardize, analyze, and optimize processes from the Line Control department at the semiconductor fab of Infineon Technologies Dresden. Several improvements were proposed and are now at the implementation stage. However, some results are already visible, which we will discuss in the last section. The paper is concluded with limitations and an outlook into further research.