This paper gives an overview of advanced scheduling and dispatching policies for WIP (work in process) management within the wafer fabrication process. Additionally, the pros and cons of general WIP control philosophies are opposed. Several control policies are evaluated for the application in complex make-to-order environment such as ASIC production. Based on the real shop floor environment of Philips SMST and the currently used control policies a proposal is presented answering the following two questions:What are the requirements of tomorrow's WIP control systems applied in make-to-order wafer fabrication? How can these control policies be implemented and introduced on the shop floor using existing WIP control and scheduling systems?

Within the last 15 years many semiconductor enterprises introduced CIM concepts successfully. The main effort thereby was spent on the development and introduction of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), also known as Computer Aided Manufacturing Systems (CAM) or Shop Floor Control Systems (SFC). These systems define the functions to control the activities on the shop floor, including direct control of production equipment management of materials, tools, fixtures and maintenance. Meanwhile several configurable standard systems do exist (e.g. Workstream, Factory Works, Promis, Poseidon), are installed and running within various semiconductor factories around the world. During the last few years it shows more and more that the focus has shifted from the factory Ievel to the enterprise Ievel. This is mainly due to the increasing global presence of the companies. Since semiconductor enterprises act more and more in a global manner and logistic processes for manufacturing and development span around the whole world, information systems and related architectures have to be developed to cover the new requirements resulting from this focus shift. Semiconductor enterprises of the next two decades will be the testing areas of the concepts of the future. The efficient processing and distribution of logistic information will play a key role in obtaining semiconductor enterprises with a significant higher degree of flexibility, productivity and quality. Of particular interest is the configuration of the logistic data processing and distribution activities. Information systems of the future used for planning, scheduling and control will execute highly complex algorithms (e.g. parameterized feed forward control) and have distributed object oriented system architectures which can be connected by standard communication interfaces. This paper depicts the problems of providing the proper information technology needed for future G. Jacucci et al. (eds.), Globalization of Manufacturing in the Digital Communications Era of the 21st Century © Springer Science+Business Media New York 1998 628 semiconductor enterprises. In addition the presentation will give concepts for approaches to perform the transition to next generation logistic information systems. At the end of these developments will be the Information Integrated Enterprise where • logistic processes can be effectively planned and controlled • information system complexity is dramatically reduced • implementation and support costs are lowered • enterprise resource effectiveness is increased by the integration of logistics, automation, scheduling and maintenance systems.