Integrated optimization of multiple warehouse replenishment for semiconductor manufacturing

With high variability of customer ordering in current marketing environment, it brings big challenges for manufacturers to adapt this kind variation with dynamic operation mechanism. From suppliers to manufactures and manufactures to customers, inventory management plays a critical role in the whole supply chain. In recent years, inventory problems are not limited to be solved with traditional economic mathematical model and lots of researchers focus their works on inventory optimization from supply chain perspectives. However, most of these models of inventory management are limited to be applied into external perspective of shop floor manufacturing process. Towards this end, it is necessary to develop a model which can be applied into internal perspective of factory and guide real on-line inventory of shop floor. This paper presents a dynamic inventory management method from multiple warehouse replenishment perspective. Within the shop floor environment of semiconductor manufacturing, the presented model is employed to optimize the inventory problem from internal and external perspectives of factory simultaneously. A computational simulation with the flexsim7.0 software is conducted to testify the proposed model and mechanism. The simulation results show that the improved solutions are achieved with the indicators of inventory quantity control, customer order fulfillment, and cycle time reduction.