This paper presents an improvement project in a semiconductor industry to minimize product lead time in automated optical inspection (AOI) operation. The Lean Thinking (LT) approach is applied to drive this improvement project, which it performed based on three main stages; observation, improvement and validation. Initial observation study found a significant cause of this problem (lead time). There have improper record and control mechanisms of receiving the product lots from production department, picking the products lots for inspection and restoring the products lots after inspection. Therefore, this not only cause the high and inconsistent lead time of products lot to be inspect (due to random rack location searching during picking and restoring processes) also the right sequence of product lots from one type to another that went through the AOI operation cannot systematically managed and controlled. In improvement stage, a production control system, namely Kanban-based First-In-First-Out (FIFO) system is proposed to solve the stated problem. Generally, Kanban technique applied in this research project is to systematically guide the inspection operator for performing AOI operation based on FIFO rule. There are two keys rules behind Kanban technique application; First is to record the sequence of the product lots that been received from production department and obtained the rack location for their temporary store. Second is to provide input information for the inspection operator to perform the activities picking and restoring in the right sequence of product lot direct to the rack location that has been stored before. Another technical mechanism included in Kanban-based FIFO system is the application of supermarket buffer system to minimize the wafer lot searching activity. In validation stage, the proposed solution has been tested within the period of one month. Results show that the searching times for picking and restoring the product lots has reduced to 77.0% and overall product lead time due inspection process has reduced 54.2%. The mechanism of Kanban-based FIFO system is then proposed to the top management of the case study company to be embedded with Internet of Thing (IoT) technology to support Industrial 4.0 evolution.
