Global planning at Harris Semiconductor

Abstract

Harris Semiconductor needed an integrated system to manage its entire supply-chain, especially after tripling its manufacturing capacity to enter the commercial markets. The response was to implement the manufacturing planning system known as IMPReSS, Integrated Manufacturing Production Requirements Scheduling System. It is one of the reasons that Harris has been a consistent world-class 95% or better on time delivery company since 1993 with over 30,000 Finished Goods, a fact that was not lost on the Edelman Committee. IMPReSS won the prestigious management science 1995 Franz Edelman Award for its contribution. IMPReSS is a global information network of distributed databases which includes an optimization-based, semiconductor-specific planning engine that scans the entire pipeline. This paper includes the reasons for choosing a Linear Programming based planning engine from the University of California, Berkeley, known as BPS, over the traditional MRP systems; improvements made to BPS resulting in a new planning engine known as the Harris Planning System, HPS; and the lessons learned by Harris.