-- draft copy -- Ronald E. Giachetti Formation Of An Electronics Manufacturing Supply Chain Via Information Models Ronald E. Giachetti Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Florida International University Miami, FL 33174 Abstract The agile electronics manufacturing enterprise must rapidly develop new products by close interaction with their supplier network. Design for manufacturing must occur in this extended and distributed enterprise across traditional organizational boundaries. This paper proposes the use of information models to support this activity. A manufacturing model is built using the EXPRESS information modeling language to model the manufacturing process capabilities of the vendors. Compatibility ratings based on possibility theory search the vendor’s information models to compare the product profile requirements and the manufacturing process capabilities. A multi-attribute decision model is invoked to weigh the importance of the selection criteria and aggregate the multiple compatibility ratings into a single metric that ranks the vendors according to their ability to manufacturing the product. The system provides feedback exposing why certain compatibility ratings were assigned. The contribution of this paper is to model the information requirement of an agile enterprise and provide an approach for dynamically selecting vendors. Keywords: Agile manufacturing, supply chain management, concurrent engineering, design for manufacturing, vendor selection, multi-attribute decision making. Introduction Electronics are appearing in markets that were primarily mechanical less than a decade ago. Their emergence is due to increasing market demand for more features, product variation, and increased expertise in designing and fabricating electronic products. Electronics are the driving technology that support many of the “smart” products that are introduced to the market. The automotive industry is a growing consumer of electronics that are being used to control virtually every aspect of driving [Fine et al., 1996]. The household appliance industry now uses electronics for control and diagnostics, and feature enhancements, etc. This is in addition to the traditional markets in computers, electronics entertainment, and telecommunications. As electronics become more prevalent in all products the ability to form partnerships with electronics companies is particularly important. Companies are seeking partners so that they can concentrate on their core competencies. The reason is that no single company can provide the marketing, design, manufacturing and distribution because the product’s complexity has grown so much. One of the business realities and factors underlying US PWB manufacturing growth is a continuing trend over the past 20 years for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to purchase PWBs from qualified suppliers. Companies are concentrating more on their core competencies and seek vendor partnerships for key inputs. The percent of OEMs producing their own boards (captives) has dropped from 60% in 1979 to 15% in 1995. Likewise, the percent of PWBs produced by independent manufacturers has increased from 40% to 85% today [IPC 1996]. Similar trends are also occurring in Europe as reported by de Graff et al., (1997). As a result companies must now incorporate fuller consideration of suppliers in the product realization process. This is referred to as the extended enterprise and is graphically show in Figure 1. 5/4/2005 10:26:55 AM 1