Complexity management in the semiconductor supply chain and manufacturing using PROS analysis

Abstract

Supply chain complexity is a rising problem, especially in the semiconductor industry. Many innovative activities occur in the daily supply chain and manufacturing, and these changes inevitably bring in the complexities to the organization. But not all of them are valuable to the business goals. Decision makers want to keep value-added complexity and reduce non-value-added complexity. To manage the complexity, we propose a framework with four steps from changes identification towards the final decision making. The core solution of this framework is PROS (process, role, object, state) idea, which provides an understandable and structural way to describe the complexity. A simplified small real example from semiconductor supply chain is used to demonstrate this approach. The results indicate that the PROS idea is able to analyze complexity from different aspects and extract most key information; however, how to measure the structural complexity of a large complex system without complete information is still under investigation.