Improving Supply Chain Management: a model for Collaborative Quality Control

This paper aims to address the gap of quality control in current Supply Chain Management (SCM) system in the semiconductor industry. The purpose of this study is to enhance the SCM system and practices for overall product quality assurance of an outsourced process physically located in different geographic areas. Without visibility and quality control, the supply continuity of the outsourced production line could be at risk. In this paper, we outline the IDM outsourcing demands different requirements from traditional fabless outsourcing, address the issues to meet those new requirements and develop the building process of our Collaborative Quality Control (CQC) model. Our four-year implementation of CQC model indicates that product quality through outsourcing using this upgraded SCM system for quality is as good as internally producing the product. With the CQC model to help secure the supply continuity gives enormous advantages to IDM outsourcing to leverage external resources the same as internal resources. Better capital efficiency, extra virtual capacity, huge surge capability, high flexibility, better cost structure are all critical to improve ROE in such a competitive business environment today.