[labnetwork] Equipment reservation efficiencies

Mon Jul 17 10:07:04 EDT 2017

CNST at NIST has thought about this quite a bit, and we now have a ruleset that I think works pretty well to match reservation time with usage time. I work on the lab logistics software for CNST, called NEMO, and I can describe the things we’ve implemented.

  *   Up front training – all new users complete a tutorial that’s built into our lab management software, discussing reservation policy
  *   2 hours before their reservation, users are sent an email reminding them they have a reservation coming up
  *   Missed reservations
     *   Users are charged a fee for missed reservations – the fee varies per tool
     *   Users are informed automatically via email that they missed a reservation
  *   Automated “reservation abuse” reports are available to NanoFab managers
     *   Reservation abuse is defined as cancelling, moving, or extending a reservation shortly before the reservation would have started
     *   We have some code that will calculate a score for each user
     *   NanoFab management can choose to do what they will with this information
  *   When a user has finished using a tool, and they “disable” it through NEMO, any remainder of their reservation is relinquished. This allows other users to see that the tool is available (when someone is done early) and pop in to make a reservation if they’d like
  *   A set of reservation and usage parameters that can be tweaked for each tool:
     *   Reservation horizon – “Users may create reservations this many days in advance (but not beyond the horizon)”
     *   Minimum usage block time – “The minimum amount of time that a user must reserve this tool for a single reservation”
     *   Maximum usage block time – “The maximum amount of time that a user may reserve this tool for a single reservation”
     *   Maximum reservations per day
     *   Maximum future reservation time – The total maximum amount of time that a user may reserve from the current time onwards
     *   Missed reservation threshold – The amount of time that a tool reservation may go unused before it is automatically marked as "missed" and hidden from the calendar. Usage can be from any user, regardless of who the reservation was originally created for

I hope this helps.

-- Dylan Klomparens

From: labnetwork-bounces at mtl.mit.edu [mailto:labnetwork-bounces at mtl.mit.edu] On Behalf Of John D Shott
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2017 9:08 PM
To: Vito Logiudice <vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca>
Cc: labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu
Subject: Re: [labnetwork] Equipment reservation efficiencies

Vito:

As I no longer am a practicing engineer, you are welcome to take my comments with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, I do have some comments based on prior experience with this topic.

For starters, since 7x24 = 168 hours, if your evaporator was reserved for 192 hours in a week you have a different problem …

Nonetheless, my guess is that many folks see "reservation challenges" on their high-demand tools. When a tool is used a lot, I think that folks begin to grab reservation time just in case they need it.

I don't know what reservation system you run, but do you have the ability to make tool-specific reservation rules?If so, things that can help include tinkering with the reservation horizon (how far in advance a reservation can be made), maximum duration of one or all reservations over that horizon, maximum number of reservations for a single user over that horizon, etc.

Can you track when reservations were made and deleted in addition to the period for which the reservation was made?  If so, I expect that you will see evidence of a "feeding frenzy" … many reservations are snapped up as far in the future as legally allowed by your policies/software. We have seen the use of keystroke automation tools to snap up a reservation the second that a new time slot became available. Even if you don't intend to use it, having reservations on a high-demand tool can be a useful bartering tool in many lab economies.  You and your reservation policies need to help your users NOT get caught up in reservation gaming …

What is your reservation deletion/cancellation policy … or are people simply failing to cancel reservations?  Along these lines, a frequent suggestion is to "charge them for unused reservations". While that is easy to say, I have yet to see a reliable, automated means of determining that a reservation was not used. What is the evaporator was down? What if an upstream tool was down? What if, …

Your lab users are smart: have they found a way to actually use the tool for longer than their usage records indicate?  That becomes a question of what is actually interlocked on the tool, but if you interlock cooling water or things that affect only the actual evaporation, for example, your users likely know that and may not be paying for all of their actual equipment time.

Of course, in a university research lab, a tool that is actually used more than 50% of the time should probable place that tool quite high on our "we'd like another X" list.

I certainly expect to see a lively discussion of this topic …

Have a good weekend,

John
Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 14, 2017, at 4:53 PM, Vito Logiudice <vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca>> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,

We have struggled for some time now with equipment reservations which tend to be much greater than equipment use times. This is especially problematic on some of our most popular tools.

For instance, records for the past 7 day period show an enable (or use) time for our popular e-beam evaporator of 86 hours while the tool was reserved for a total of 192 hours during this period. This translates into a tool reservation efficiency of 45%; this seems very poor to me.

I can appreciate that it can be difficult to estimate how much time one might need on any given tool. However, I’m inclined to think that a robust and well-maintained tool with well understood and documented processes (as is the case for this particular deposition system) should allow our membership to plan their work accurately enough so that the tool’s reservation efficiency should remain consistently above 75% or so.

If this is a parameter that you happen track for your operations, I would appreciate hearing what your typical reservation efficiency range might be for some of your most popular tools. I would also appreciate hearing your thoughts on what you might have done in the past to improve this performance parameter for these particularly popular tools.

Thank you for any insights. All feedback is welcome.

Best regards,
Vito
--
Vito Logiudice  MASc, P.Eng.
Director, Quantum NanoFab
University of Waterloo
Lazaridis QNC 1207
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON           Canada N2L 3G1
Tel.: (519) 888-4567  ext. 38703
Email: vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:vito.logiudice at uwaterloo.ca>
Website: https://fab.qnc.uwaterloo.ca

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