A MRP-II based planning method for the TFT-LCD manufacturing

TFT-LCD is a critical module for many consumer electronics products. The manufacturing of TFT-LCD is a material-driven as well as a capital intensive industry. Its manufacturing process is composed of three successive phases, array, cell and module, and each has different planning characteristics. Therefore, an effective planning of production capacity and material requirement play an important role for the competitive advantage of this industry. In this research, a planning method based on the MRP II framework is developed for the TFT-LCD manufacturing. The developed method focuses on the mid-term planning, based on the MRP II framework, wherein the planning algorithm allocates the fabs capacity for the array phase, and then calculate the material requirement plan for the cell phase. To validate the quality of this method, 62 weeks of real factory data are studied, and the result shows a variation less than 5%.