Best practice sharing for complexity management in supply chains of the semiconductor industry

Global supply chain becomes complex because of a fast increasing number of dynamic interactions which need to be handled. The semiconductor industry is characterized by long product life cycles, highly differentiated products, and non-linearity in the manufacturing process; furthermore the semiconductor companies also face a volatile market due to the upstream position in the supply chain of consumer electronics which makes the demand from end-customers hard to forecast. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the key drivers of supply chain complexity in the semiconductor industry from practical view and to find the common ground between them. Several prevalent problems address different aspects of supply chain complexity occurred in daily operations were collected from an international semiconductor company, and discussed at an internal workshop with around forty participants from supply chain, IT or other business units.