Abstract

This research is timely because many High Technology Product Producing Factories (HTPPF) are still following the trend of factories that produces the likes of canned food or even cars where all machines are jointed from start to end. Many HTPPF have not realized that improvements to product must be done every day to keep market share. And to perform research continuously, buffers in-between production machines are absolutely necessary. The absence of such buffers has caused a many hard disk manufacturing factories to close down especially in the Japan, Korea and Taiwan (notably Sony, NEC, Matsushita, Samsung and Trace). These factories were leaders in joining up production lines from start to end; but discovered that it led to a disadvantage in their ability to perform the necessary continuous improvement in product quality and capacity. Decision makers in these factories thought that a dedicated research line is all that is needed for research. This paper explains why a dedicated research line is not the answer to the needs of a HTPPF. Currently 90% of hard disks are produced by Western Digital and Seagate, with Toshiba having 10% market share. Western Digital and Seagate were slow in automating production lines which benefitted them in their research capability.