[labnetwork] 24/7 operations

[Daniel C. Christensen]

Our buddy system at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is very similar to what John Hughes described at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  So I’ve shamelessly cut and edited his email to describe our buddy system.  The cleanrooms are accessible 24/7 and we enforce a buddy policy outside of our normally staffed hours (M-F 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.). We allow all activities to be conducted off-hours except equipment maintenance operations, but researchers are encouraged to do processing using hazardous gases only when staff is in the building. The hazardous gas vaults themselves are highly restricted and cannot be accessed except by a very few staff. 


 


Our 8 cleanrooms are contiguous and have a single entry point where the gowning room door connects to a central clean corridor.  We have a pc on each side of this door to allow for “log-in” and “log-out” of the cleanroom . This log  in/out of the cleanroom enters data into our “Coral-like” lab monitoring system (called CRESS) which allows for real-time monitoring of everyone in the cleanrooms.  CRESS keeps a running total of the “body count” in the cleanroom.  The system generates a report to the staff of buddy system violations.

 

During non-business hours (remember to do special programming to make an M-F holidays buddy hours) the system does the following:


-          -  When no one is in the cleanroom, two users must log in with-in a couple of minutes of each other to enter.


-          -  When there are >2 users in the cleanroom, a user may leave the cleanroom as normal.


-          -  When there are just two users left in the cleanroom and “User A” tries to leave, the logout pc tells  ”User A” that they are leaving a lone user.  The pc then allows "User A" to click a button to continue their exit or another button to abort their exit.  Normally, “User A” will then click to exit followed within a couple of minutes by User B exiting via the logout pc.


-          -  We consider it a buddy system violation for BOTH “User A” and User B” in the above scenario if User A leaves the cleanroom and User B doesn’t leave shortly thereafter.

 
Dan C 
 
 
Daniel C Christensen
Lab Manager
Wisconsin Center for Apllied Microelectronics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
dan at engr.wisc.edu 
608-262-6877