Available-to-promise systems in the semiconductor industry: a review of contributions and a preliminary experiment

Abstract

This paper focuses on Available-To-Promise (ATP) systems in the semiconductor industry. These systems have been successfully applied in a number of sectors, although it is often mentioned that their advantages increase with the ability of obtaining accurate forecasts, and with the possibility of identifying a relatively large number of different customers or customer classes. These conditions do not necessarily fulfil in the semiconductor industry, therefore it is interesting to analyse the few case studies of these systems that have been presented in the literature. A preliminary experiment is carried out using a foundry plant data to investigate the influence of the forecast accuracy and forecast bias in the performance of these systems. The results highlight the problems caused by the lack of homogeneity in the forecast, and the distortion introduced by customers ‘inflating’ their projected demand in order to ensure a higher share of the orders.