Implementing Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) System for Semiconductor Manufacturing: A Case at Korean Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

Semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most complex and capital-intensive processes composed of several hundreds of operations. In today's competitive business environments, it is more important than ever before to manage manufacturing process effectively to achieve better performances in terms of customer satisfaction and productivity than those of competitors. To obtain such fruitful outcome, an effective management of IC chip production process including production planning and scheduling decisions should be made intensively. These decisions include demand planning, capacity planning, production planning and production scheduling decisions. Therefore, many semiconductor manufacturing companies implemented advanced planning and scheduling (APS) system as a management tool for the complex semiconductor manufacturing process Although there exist a few articles and survey results that introduce industrial cases of implementing production planning and scheduling systems for semiconductor manufacturing, research articles are very rare that explicitly reveals key issues to be resolved for successful implementation of production planning and scheduling systems. Sharing industrial experiences in terms of key issues and lessons learned are very important and useful to both academies and practitioners because challengeable research topics and critical factors for successful system implementation can be identified with the experiences. From these reasons, in this paper, we briefly describe several key issues resolved during APS system implementation project at a Korean semiconductor manufacturing company, which may be useful in building similar APS systems at other semiconductor manufacturing companies. We firstly explain roles of production planning and scheduling in semiconductor manufacturing and principal factors that make the production planning and scheduling more difficult. Then we describe the APS system implementation project at Korean semiconductor manufacturing company in terms of key issues. The analysis of several alternative solutions for those issues is also revealed. Finally, we show the results of productivity improvement due to the APS system implementation with actual performance statistics.