Multi-site available-to-promise modeling for assemble-to-order manufacturing: An illustration on TFT-LCD manufacturing

Available-to-promise (ATP) serves as a significant factor to enhance customer service in order promising. Most research regarding ATP considered only one plant and was not mainly developed under the make-to-order (MTO) or assemble-to-order (ATO) strategy. We constructed a generic three-stage model of multi-site ATP mechanism for ATO manufacturing and experimented on a local TFT-LCD manufacturer. We further tested eight scenarios of ATP allocation plans based on different cost structures in the objective functions to compare the ATP plans and performances. Results showed that we can obtain an appropriate ATP plan with proper cost structure.