Postponement for Designing Mass-Customized Supply Chains: Categorization and Framework for Strategic Decision Making

The concept of mass-customization has been suggested as the mandatory capability in the 21st century market place where customers individual need must be satisfied rather than the need of mass market. Postponement is a powerful methodology to achieve Cost-effective mass customization when applied in the scope of supply chain. There have been a number of literatures that employed postponement or reviewed postponement in a complex manner but not much on providing a simple framework practitioners can easily apply for establishing the level of implementing postponement to their supply chains. In this paper the classificationof the postponement in terms of level of implementation and the strategic decision framework for selecting the right postponement that considers realistic aspect of recent economy are presented

Opposites Attract: An Approach to Collaborative Supply Chain Management between Semiconductor and Automotive Companies

This article illustrates the differences between the semiconductor and the automotive industry and the subsequent challenges to their common supply chain. The weak points at the interfaces between the two supply chains will systematically be identified and assessed. Based on this analysis, a toolkit for collaborative supply chain planning and execution between the automotive and the semiconductor industry is presented. A fit/gap analysis assesses the measures and their potential to solve the supply chain challenges in a systematic manner. The model is built upon existing supply chain management frameworks and defines a set of specific optimization measures for the problem at hand. These are designed to ensure a better alignment of planning and control processes between the automotive and the semiconductor industry

Cloud-based manufacturing-as-a-service environment for customized products

This paper describes the paradigm of cloud-based services which are used to envisage a new generation of configurable manufacturing systems. Unlike previous approaches to mass customization (that simply reprogram individual machines to produce specific shapes) the system reported here is intended to enable the customized production of technologically complex products by dynamically configuring a manufacturing supply chain. In order to realize such a system, the resources (i.e. production capabilities) have to be designed to support collaboration throughout the whole production network, including their adaption to customer-specific production. The flexible service composition as well as the appropriate IT services required for its realization show many analogies with common cloud computing approaches. For this reason, this paper describes the motivation and challenges that are related to cloud-based manufacturing and illustrates emerging technologies supporting this vision byestablishing an appropriate Manufacturing-as-a-Service environment based on manufacturing service descriptions

Re-qualifying Delivered Devices and Inventory for New Product Specifications, a Case Study

The paper examines an e-Commerce system for re-qualifying delivered products and inventory for new product specifications, and proposes a streamline supply chain model with a mass-customization and a customer-direct capability. The paper also introduces benefits and foundation for a strategy for producing generic renewable designs. The empirical research was carried out by means of a case study in a Finnish SME that manufactures laser diodes for international markets. To provide a background, the product customization in a semiconductors industry, system analysis and architecture are addressed. The analysis and conclusions are based on the authors’ experimental findings from this area. The study shows that a mass-customization is beneficial in the semiconductors industry as long as the laser diode designs are properly parameterized and structured in the database

How and why communications industry suppliers get “squeezed out” by outsourcing: cases, impact and the next phases

The communications systems,terminals,and service, industries, have undergone over the past ten years a significant technological internal evolution and external revolution at customer end (such as shifting to IP, wireless 3G and LTE evolutions, new terminals, broadband...). Very little management research has studied their survivability irrespective of changes in demand volumes, due to technological sourcing and outsourcing practices driven by other global industries serving as predators in view of the huge business potential of communications products and services. These other industries include computing software, semiconductor and contract manufacturing industries, many of with roots in emerging countries. This paper analyzes the implications of using in-sourced genuine non-proprietary open communications standards , of the wider use of in-sourced /purchased technologies ,and of outsourced contract manufacturing . The methodology used is equilibrium analyses from case analysis data. They show a trend towards active or passive knowledge leakage. Three specific areas will be mentioned as examples .The paper also shows the processes how eventually those industries in a later cycle bounce back.Communications industry; Communications industry suppliers; Business processes; Intellectual property; Technical competence; Customer bases

Semantic data integration for supply chain management: with a specific focus on applications in the semiconductor industry

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is essential to monitor, control, and enhance the performance of SCs. Increasing globalization and diversity of Supply Chains (SC)s lead to complex SC structures, limited visibility among SC partners, and challenging collaboration caused by dispersed data silos. Digitalization is responsible for driving and transforming SCs of fundamental sectors such as the semiconductor industry. This is further accelerated due to the inevitable role that semiconductor products play in electronics, IoT, and security systems. Semiconductor SCM is unique as the SC operations exhibit special features, e.g., long production lead times and short product life. Hence, systematic SCM is required to establish information exchange, overcome inefficiency resulting from incompatibility, and adapt to industry-specific challenges. The Semantic Web is designed for linking data and establishing information exchange. Semantic models provide high-level descriptions of the domain that enable interoperability. Semantic data integration consolidates the heterogeneous data into meaningful and valuable information. The main goal of this thesis is to investigate Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) for SCM with a specific focus on applications in the semiconductor industry. As part of SCM, End-to-End SC modeling ensures visibility of SC partners and flows. Existing models are limited in the way they represent operational SC relationships beyond one-to-one structures. The scarcity of empirical data from multiple SC partners hinders the analysis of the impact of supply network partners on each other and the benchmarking of the overall SC performance. In our work, we investigate (i) how semantic models can be used to standardize and benchmark SCs. Moreover, in a volatile and unpredictable environment, SC experts require methodical and efficient approaches to integrate various data sources for informed decision-making regarding SC behavior. Thus, this work addresses (ii) how semantic data integration can help make SCs more efficient and resilient. Moreover, to secure a good position in a competitive market, semiconductor SCs strive to implement operational strategies to control demand variation, i.e., bullwhip, while maintaining sustainable relationships with customers. We examine (iii) how we can apply semantic technologies to specifically support semiconductor SCs. In this thesis, we provide semantic models that integrate, in a standardized way, SC processes, structure, and flows, ensuring both an elaborate understanding of the holistic SCs and including granular operational details. We demonstrate that these models enable the instantiation of a synthetic SC for benchmarking. We contribute with semantic data integration applications to enable interoperability and make SCs more efficient and resilient. Moreover, we leverage ontologies and KGs to implement customer-oriented bullwhip-taming strategies. We create semantic-based approaches intertwined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to address semiconductor industry specifics and ensure operational excellence. The results prove that relying on semantic technologies contributes to achieving rigorous and systematic SCM. We deem that better standardization, simulation, benchmarking, and analysis, as elaborated in the contributions, will help master more complex SC scenarios. SCs stakeholders can increasingly understand the domain and thus are better equipped with effective control strategies to restrain disruption accelerators, such as the bullwhip effect. In essence, the proposed Sematic Web Technology-based strategies unlock the potential to increase the efficiency, resilience, and operational excellence of supply networks and the semiconductor SC in particular

Facilitating the analysis of a UK national blood service supply chain using distributed simulation

In an attempt to investigate blood unit ordering policies, researchers have created a discrete-event model of the UK National Blood Service (NBS) supply chain in the Southampton area of the UK. The model has been created using Simul8, a commercial-off-the-shelf discrete-event simulation package (CSP). However, as more hospitals were added to the model, it was discovered that the length of time needed to perform a single simulation severely increased. It has been claimed that distributed simulation, a technique that uses the resources of many computers to execute a simulation model, can reduce simulation runtime. Further, an emerging standardized approach exists that supports distributed simulation with CSPs. These CSP Interoperability (CSPI) standards are compatible with the IEEE 1516 standard The High Level Architecture, the defacto interoperability standard for distributed simulation. To investigate if distributed simulation can reduce the execution time of NBS supply chain simulation, this paper presents experiences of creating a distributed version of the CSP Simul8 according to the CSPI/HLA standards. It shows that the distributed version of the simulation does indeed run faster when the model reaches a certain size. Further, we argue that understanding the relationship of model features is key to performance. This is illustrated by experimentation with two different protocols implementations (using Time Advance Request (TAR) and Next Event Request (NER)). Our contribution is therefore the demonstration that distributed simulation is a useful technique in the timely execution of supply chains of this type and that careful analysis of model features can further increase performance

Modular Production Networks in Electronics: The Nexus between Management and Economics Research

In the last two decades, the electronics industry has evolved from a vertically integrated in-dustry to a vertically segmented one. This transformation has often been attributed to the modularization of electronic products. In this paper, we argue that the degree of modularity is an active choice variable for a firm. As a result, it is necessary to focus on the underlying fac-tors that drive both modularity and the organization of production. This provides insights into the transformation taking place in global electronics production, with vertical fragmentation, horizontal consolidation, and the growth of Asian electronics production.Modularity, electronics, outsourcing, contract manufacturing, East Asia