Optimal supply chain configurations in semiconductor manufacturing.

As a semiconductor supply chain becomes widespread and the competition pressure is very fierce, the detrimental effects of increasing varieties and variations are magnified in the supply chain. But many important issues, such as different service priorities, adaptability, controllability and scalability of performance metrics, have not been addressed in the literature. Conventional modelling techniques of supply chain operations are no longer effective for supply chain configuration. Therefore, a proposed empirical model was first built to catch up the relationship between supply-chain configuration and metrics under the influence of the variability sources. Next, an optimal supply chain configuration model is formulated as a polynomial goal programming model to accommodate different goal objectives. Finally, an efficient solution methodology is further developed to find out the optimal supply chain configuration. Our results show that our proposed approach can easily be adapted to the practices in semiconductor supply chain, and the solution methodology developed in this paper is truly promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]