If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Semiconductor wafer fabrication (FAB) is recognized as one of the most complex manufacturing systems. A newly built FAB has to pass various audits from its customer before the customer's wafers are initially produced. 5S audit is one of them. In order to comply with customer (auditor) expectations toward 5S practice, this paper assists wafer fabrication managers in allocating the limited resources to places that are valued most by their customer. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach -This paper applied Yang's refined Kano model to Ho's 5S checklist to prioritise these checkpoints for a FAB. An empirical study based on Ho's 5S checklist from experienced internal auditors (respondents) to prioritise 5S activities was explored to justify its feasibility for a FAB and importance-satisfaction for customer. Findings -An empirical study in a case FAB demonstrated how the refined model prioritised 5S activities based on Ho's 5S checklist. The result of this study further showed that quality attributes possess different identities, which could offer management more framable scopes to implement 5S practice and sustain 5S scene management. Research limitations/implications -Since this empirical study was focused on a 300-mm wafer fabrication company, the results and findings may not generally explain other wafer-size fabrications. Practical implications -This study was applied to a real-world case of a newly built 300-mm semiconductor fabrication in Taiwan. It is a straightforward bridge to link a methodology in a practical manner to disseminate information to both researchers and practitioners. Originality/value -From the adoption of the refined Kano model, specific required check points for 5S practice are transformed from subjective, conceptual and linguistic practice to be identified, quantified and prioritised for semiconductor wafer fabrication under resources constraints to cater customer's 5S expectations and to generate more attention in building-up a much more robust scene management. This paper provided a systemic way to prioritise 5S activities for a semiconductor wafer fabrication.

5S practice follows structured 5S activities from structurize, systematize, sanitize, standardize, and self-discipline to deal with scene management in shop floor control, and it is regarded as the most troublesome aspect with respect to environmental safety and health for a semiconductor manufacturing fabrication. The improved action items for 5S activities can amount to thousands from messy paper filing to untightened chemical piping. However, there is no clear key performance indicator to evaluate how good (safe) the fab is and how to be good (safe) for 5S practice. Failure modes and effects analysis is an effective and efficient way to deal with risk assessment for 5S activities and to prioritize the action requests from the improved result of continuous improvement. However, when failure modes and effects analysis is applied to the risk assessment of 5S audit, the conventional risk priority number lacks of all comprehensive information and misleads to a bias for not considering weights of severity (S), occurrence (O), and detectability (D). In order to improve the method of risk priority number evaluation, this article combining 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic representation model and weighted geometric averaging operators to quantify 5S audit findings is proposed to eliminate the bias from different 5S auditors. This is the first approach for the numerous 5S action items to be quantified and prioritized with resource constraints to sustain 5S practice robust. A case study in a fab was demonstrated to show how the model was implemented to approve its validity.

Purpose – Semiconductor wafer fabrication (FAB) is recognized as one of the most complex manufacturing systems. A newly built FAB has to pass various audits from its customer before the customer's wafers are initially produced. 5S audit is among one of them. When building a state-of-the-art 300 mm/130 μm FAB, it is common to find hundreds of action items to complete in order to comply with the customer's (auditor) expectations toward 5S practice. The purpose of this paper is to assist wafer fabrication managers in allocating the limited resources on 5S practice to the places that are valued most by their customer. Design/methodology/approach – This study proposes an application of the Kano model with a modified customer satisfaction coefficient (CS coefficient) to effectively prioritize thousands of action items for a wafer fabrication. Findings – Some new discoveries associated with shop floor management that may be neglected by academicians and practitioners are presented here. Surprisingly, greatly substantial non-linear contributions of attractive to-scene management are revealed with little efforts on the 5S practice. These attributes prove to be impressive to customers and typical instructions beneficial to future 5S practice are embraced as well. Practical implications – A real case drawn from a 300 mm semiconductor wafer FAB in Taiwan is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. Originality/value – From the adoption of this proposed methodology, an influential set of specific required checkpoints for 5S practice is transformed from subjective, conceptual and linguistic practice to be identified, quantified and prioritized for semiconductor wafer fabrication under resources constraints to cater the customer's 5S expectations and to generate more attentions in building-up a much more robust scene management.

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