Fine planning for supply chains in semiconductor manufacture

In the course of globalisation and increasing customer orientation within a highly dynamic business environment, semiconductor manufacturing supply chains have changed their business strategies and transformed into new economic and industrial organisations: Virtual Enterprises. Consisting of a number of geographically distributed production facilities, such enterprises are often closely coupled in partnerships with suppliers, subcontractors and customers. Production planning and control in the make-to-order environment of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) production is a difficult task, as it has to be optimal both for the local manufacturing units and for the whole supply chain network. Centralised MRP II systems which are in operation in most of today's manufacturing enterprises are not flexible enough to satisfy the demands of this highly dynamic co-operative environment. In this paper we present a distributed planning methodology for semiconductor manufacturing supply chains. The developed system is based on an approach that leaves as much responsibility and expertise for optimisation as possible to the local planning systems while a global co-ordinating entity ensures best performance and efficiency of the whole supply chain. Fine planning takes rough due dates based on capacity models of the local manufacturing units and optimises both local and global order flow through the Virtual Enterprise. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.