A case study: electronic just-in-time system for integrated circuit industry in South-East Asia

Summary form only given as follows. This paper investigates flow balancing policies between assembly process flow and product inspection flow in an integrated circuit manufacturing system (ICMS). The ICMS environment is characterized by the presence of a large product variety and small unit volume exogenous demand. In this paper, we study the optimal work-in-process control method towards implementing the electronic kanban system with two sets of experimental factors: managerial decision factors and environmental factors. Results from our study show that machine breakdowns, the lot size variety and flow balancing policy all affect performance. In addition, the adverse impact of product mix lumpiness can generally be managed by dynamically flow balancing and standard lot size planning on a daily basis. Thus machine re-allocation and product re-routing approach are needed for the ICMS environment, whereby more emphasis should be placed on understanding the tradeoff between static reactive and dynamic proactive material flow balancing.