Manufacturing of High-Tech Low Shelf Live Products

This paper focuses on high-tech low shelf-life products especially in the hard disk industry of Western Digital (WD) where this author worked for 14 years. Decisions made in high-tech factories can have an immediate effect on the viability of the companies. Optimally the top leader of high-tech factories should be like Elon Musk who understands tech completely; statistically when high tech companies have leaders who were educated in non-technical fields or spent their careers in business activities have brought their companies down. This work differentiates high-tech product manufacturing with products where specs do not change much such as canned foods. The reason is that there have been cases in high-tech factories where an inability to achieve product specification has caused the companies to close within a few months. Case studies of one-time failures of high-tech factories of WD, Komag, IBM and Kodak were analyzed. Six improvements to the WD factory in Kuching were also proposed in this work. Among the main conclusions of this work is that modularization and not full automation of production is the most conducive for high-tech factories. This is due to the need for fast and continuous research to upgrade the product to stay competitive