Forecasting Cycle Time for IC Foundries─ A Case Study of Company M

• Main Authors: Peng, Yung-Chih, 彭詠智
• Other Authors: Tong, Lee-Ing
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/6qkqbm

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 管理學院工業工程與管理學程 === 101 === The manufacturing process of IC foundries is make-to-order, so it is important to have customer’s satisfaction. The customer’s satisfaction is influenced by cycle time which is one of the important performance indexes in IC industry. However, there is an obvious business cycle in IC industry, consequently the orders and product mix always have violent changes during low or peak seasons. Hence, accurately predicting cycle time can improve customer’s satisfaction. It becomes one of the most important challenges of IC foundries. Predicting cycle time is usually dependent on the experienced engineers. There is no mathematical method for forecasting the cycle time. Many studies have pointed out that turn rate is a leading indicator of cycle time and it is defined as the number of operations that have been done for the wafer per unit time. The higher turn rate indicates production speed and the shorter cycle time will be. In general, when the cycle time was deviated from the target after finishing producing products, the customer will be informed that the order will be delayed. Thus, the turn rate can be utilized to forecast and monitor the cycle time of work-in-process(WIP) simultaneously. This study first finds out which factors will influence turn rate and cycle time significantly and the stepwise regression is then employed to forecast the turn rate. The forecasted value of turn rate is utilized to forecast the cycle time. Managers can use the turn rate data to know the cycle time of WIP and arrange all activities of production. A real case from an IC foundry is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.