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Advanced material requirements planning in microelectronics manufacturing

  • US 5,943,484 A
  • Filed: 09/26/1997
  • Issued: 08/24/1999
  • Est. Priority Date: 09/26/1997
  • Status: Expired due to Fees
First Claim
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1. A computer implemented decision support method which intelligently matches assets with demand to create a material requirements planning (MRP) match to determine what work needs to be accomplished to meet demand comprising the steps of:

  • accessing a bill of materials in computer memory to identify parts by part numbers of a product to be manufactured;

    classifying each part by part number as MRP, Linear Programming (LP) MRP, or non-critical, LPMRP parts being identified from binning data and data related to permissible substitutions and build options as those parts which may be substituted for or by another part number that does not result as output from the same binning process, non-critical parts being identified by a planner using the method as those which can be run with MRP as can components and sub-components of the non-critical parts, and MRP parts being those not classified as LPMRP parts or non-critical parts;

    accessing a build options file, a bill of materials file, binning data and permissible substitutions data in computer memory and processing LPMRP parts using a series of integrated LP and MRP methods;

    processing MRP parts and non-critical parts using a heuristic method; and

    consolidating output from the processing steps using linear programming and heuristic methods and providing a single output file.

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