Forecasting Journey At On Semiconductor

FORECASTING JOURNEY AT ON SEMICONDUCTOR By Tim Williams If Sales are entrusted with the responsibility of forecasting, they are more likely to over-forecast, because the higher the forecast number, the larger the capacity reservation they will get … forecasts don’t improve if their performance is not measured … when serving customers through the distribution channel there is a tendency to over-forecast demand during an upturn if product shipped into the channel is recognized as revenue. The forecasting function at On Semiconductor was put in place in the 1990s when it was known as the Semiconductor Components, a Division of Motorola’s Semiconductor Product Sector. My first encounter with the forecasting function was in 1997 when I was a business manager in a wafer fabrication facility in Phoenix, Arizona. My factory manager just returned from the Operations Review meeting with a bad news: senior management had decided to consolidate fabrication operations and relocate the manufacturing of our products to a sister location in Seremban, Malaysia. He was somewhat disturbed by this action because the demand forecast or Request for Product (RFP) was still extremely high, ...