creative tool
Action Preventing Action (APA) is a powerful creative thinking tool that is useful for defining customer requirements. Meeting customer needs is a crucial step in driving technological advancements. In a competitive market, successful products and services are those that customers are willing to invest in, ensuring the longevity of businesses and paving the way for future development. The APA tool is specifically designed to effectively explore customer requirements, making it the perfect choice when searching for answers to the question: What should we innovate?
Innovation becomes valuable and successful when it addresses specific problems and satisfies potential customers. We present a unique tool for creative thinking called Action Preventing Action (APA), which is specifically designed to identify customer needs.
Our core principle is straightforward: The highest level of customer satisfaction is achieved when a supplier can prevent customers from continuing their existing activities.
As a creative thinking tool, APA helps companies accurately define customer requirements, which is a key factor in achieving business success.
Here are some scenarios where you and your team can benefit from using APA:
APA is a managerial creative thinking tool that helps examine the issues faced by potential customers. It involves identifying both current and future problems. A successful business understands customer needs and excels in resolving customer problems by offering relevant products and services.
Here are some situations where APA is invaluable:
These are just a few examples, but the APA thinking process can be creatively applied in numerous other scenarios, making it a versatile and essential tool for innovative problem-solving.
Wet cleaning is widely used in microchip manufacturing. Single wafer equipment is working as follows. A wafer rotates, and chemistry is poured from a movable nozzle. Water rinsing is performed at the end of the process. Loading of a new batch of the chemistry resulted in excursion - a strongly increased amount of defects was observed on the wafer after the processing. The project is dedicated to the failure analysis and creation of innovative solutions.
The process is related to microelectronics - microchip manufacturing.The purpose of the process is to create a SiO2 layer on the surface of a Si wafer. Equipment: Vertical furnace to heat the wafers in the Q2 atmosphere and perform oxidation on the wafer surface. Process: The oxidation occurs on the front side and on the back side of the wafer Requirements: Create a SiO2 thin layer with a certain thickness and low sigma - low standard deviation of the thickness between the wafers and within the waferFailure: Wafers from the lower zone have higher thickness and significantly higher within wafer sigma (standard deviation of the thickness within the wafer)
An example of how to make task prioritization with Urgency - Important Matrix (UMI) using the PRIZ Innovation Platform
The vacuum cleaner problem is an excellent example showing how to manage and resolve excursion - unexpected deviation from normal operation. Read, learn and use the platform for resolving of your excursions.
The vacuum furnace is used for sintering parts made of metal powder. To keep the shape of the parts, a binder is used. The main problem is that the vacuum furnace becomes dirty and needs a very long cleaning. Regular washing was not successful. We investigated the process and found that washing should be dedicated to the conversion of the material into a form that results in the formation of gases having low temperature of the condensation
Chilled water is used for production equipment cooling. Suddenly pH of the water started to drop. The aim of the project is to analyze the issue, understand the root cause, and propose solutions to the problem.
To reduce high turnover at the plant the managers propose different ideas, but it does not help. All proposed solutions are good, but there are some of them that are blocking the effectiveness of the rest of the solutions. The purpose of the project is to analyze the proposed solutions (perceptions) and define the blocked. The solutions with high blocking rank should be completed first to ensure the effectiveness of the rest of the ideas. The Perception Mapping (PMap) creative thinking tool was used for the blockers definition.
Flash heating of a wafer is widely used in microchip manufacturing. The purpose of the process is to prevent the diffusion of ions and atoms. During the flash process, a wafer breakage occurs. The project's purpose is to learn and understand the mechanism of the wafer breakage and propose the solutions to prevent the wafer breakage
