As part of our SEMI S2 Training, CEO Steve Barcik Amstel continues to break down the sections of SEMI S2 to help you and your teams to have a better understanding of how to have your equipment more widely accepted. Today, Steve talks about Section 7 – General Provisions.
(Link to video also available here: https://youtu.be/5fv4vL_9418)
In this section, the committee and the task force that wrote SEMI S2 gave guidance on what they thought would be useful to the end users, manufacturers, and evaluators. SEMI S2 is intended to be incorporated into equipment specifications from the end users to the equipment suppliers, meaning that in the RFQ will be outlined SEMI S2. Additional provisions are that SEMI S2 recommends and suggests that the equipment provide compliance and design features that have it meet local and national regulations, standards and laws for the place of use.
We have spent a lot of time working to harmonize those standards across the globe so that any equipment that you design will generally be accepted across the globe.
The next general provision is the recommendation and suggestion that each equipment manufacturer will maintain a product safety program. There are three main parts to a product safety program. Number one is designing the safety into your product. Number two is going through the evaluation process, like the one we are talking about now, to certify your equipment and verify that it meets the standards and then number three is what we find a lot of our customers have asked us to help them implement is being able to have a product safety reporting program. So field service people are encouraged to report near misses of their own or the clients and your end users are given a process where they can reach back out to your company and say hey we had this near miss or we had this mishap with your equipment and we want to help improve the product process and instructions about the equipment so that the equipment is safer to use on new iterations. And in the worse case scenario, the end user has a way to report to you that there was a mishap, accident or loss with your equipment, hopefully this never happens, but if it does there is a process for that and then internally within your company there is a process for handling that information, responding to it, reacting to it, and providing solutions if there is such a case.
We at High Tech Design Safety help many of our clients operate these processes and are available to come out should there ever be a mishap with your equipment. These instances are extremely rare with equipment that passes SEMI S2; however, sometimes these things happen and we are there to help should that ever occur.
The final provision of Section 7 is to also apply SEMI S2 and related standards to any ancillary equipment that is required for the operation, maintenance, installation and decommissioning of your equipment. For example, if there is an external piece of lifting equipment that is used with your equipment that it also be evaluated. That the lifting equipment design and testing be completed. High Tech Design Safety does these kind of lifting tests and validations for many clients and we can help you as well. Also if there is other ancillary equipment, maybe a chemical dispense unit or chemical cart or a source cart, or any other material handling equipment, it is intended to also be evaluated to SEMI S2.
We are going to continue to go through each of the Sections of SEMI S2, section by section. Be sure to subscribe to catch our next blog/video on SEMI S2 Training or reach out to us directly to discuss your specific needs.
