کارخانه مجازی و بازاریابی رابطه مند (بازاریابی رابطه ای) ــــ یک مطالعه موردی از شرکت تولیدی نیمه هادی تایوان

As global competition grows, building and maintaining of long-term customer relations are major concerns of companies, such that relationship marketing becomes a new marketing paradigm. Customer service in addition to manufacturing capability is an important way to keep the customer commitment. The Internet is a powerful information technology used to provide value-added service to customers and to communicate with each other. As such, the Internet-based virtual factory has been proposed to facilitate connections among partners. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the world's largest dedicated integrated circuit foundries, constructed its virtual fabrication to strengthen bonds with customers. Customers are able to access directly to TSMC's and its strategic alliance partners’ information system and thereby receive immediate status reports of their orders or some other feedback. In this paper, the framework of TSMC's virtual fabrication is introduced, and the competitive advantages resulted from virtual fabrication are investigated. Implications of TSMC's experience are then discussed.

In today's business-to-business markets, many companies face intense pressure caused by fast changes in technology, short product life cycle, and fierce global competition. It is increasingly important for companies to help customer's business be able to change production plans as market demands dictate. In this situation, much attention has been paid to timely and customized services, which provide customers easy access to and control of the elements throughout the manufacturing process. In the past decade, new thinking about the buyer–seller relationships is so evident that experts have suggested that relationship marketing (RM) is a new marketing paradigm (Webster, 1992; Grönroos, 1994). It focuses on approaches to build, develop and maintain all successful relational exchanges (Berry, 1983; Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Grönroos, 1994). By building and maintaining customer relationships, the selling partner can achieve higher financial performance (Kalwani & Narayandas, 1995; Holm, Eriksson, & Johanson, 1999), customer trust, commitment (Morgan & Hunt, 1994) and satisfaction (Cannon & Perreault, 1999). According to resource-based view, Morgan and Hunt (1999) also argued that long-term relationships are one of the sources of sustainable competitive advantage. To lure new customers and to hold onto existing ones, businesses are investing heavily in information technologies. The Internet plays an ever-increasing role in understanding customer needs, serving customers better, responding faster to customer inquiries, communicating more efficiently with customers and developing new opportunities (Murphy, 1996). It is ultimately appropriate for heightening the dependence of buyer and seller, and managing customer relationship (Angelides, 1997; Armstrong & Hagel, 1996; Evans & Wurster, 1997). The Internet has many potential uses, such as being a source of information, communication tool and distribution channel, depending on the objectives and capabilities of the user (Ranchhod & Gurãu, 1999). The traditional face-to-face interchange of business marketing gives way to this emerging new transaction tool that helps to standardize and centralize the conversations (Deighton, 1997). According to a survey from Advanced Manufacturing Research, 71% of manufacturers already use the Internet to communicate with customers, and 11% plan to do so in the near future (Allnoch, 1997). Despite the perceived importance of the Internet, there are still only limited empirical studies about Internet-enabled relationships (Davis, Buchanan-Oliver, & Brodie, 1999). During the past decades, foundries have become one of the fastest growing businesses in the world and the importance and competition in this industry will keep growing in the near future. Foundries have invested in process technology and manufacturing capabilities; however, customer service is the new strategy for foundry companies to differentiate from competitors. The service-oriented new concept of “virtual fabrication (VF)”, which is proposed by the industry, has become one of the critical aspects for achieving competitiveness (Korczynski, 1997). In order to achieve higher levels of customer service, the world's largest integrated circuit (IC) manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), is constructing its VF. The implementation of VF helps in improving the customer relationships and operational efficiency, and, as a result, brings competitive advantages. The intention of this paper is, therefore, to contribute to the understanding of the Internet as an enabler that strengthens the relationships between buyers and sellers. More specifically, the purposes of this study are to: (1) introduce the framework of TSMC's VF; (2) explore the influence of important Internet capabilities on customer relationships; and (3) investigate the relationship between the services provided through Internet and operational efficiency improvement. In the following sections, first we review the past research about the important capabilities of Internet communication and the literature on RM. Next, we describe the case study methodology and the VF framework of TSMC. Then, we propose a model of the Internet-enabled VF and the resulting competitive advantages. Finally, we provide some implications and directions for future research.

Over the past few years, TSMC has become one of the world’s largest and fastest growing dedicated IC foundry companies. This article, has attempted to describe the contents of TSMC's VF, which is one of the important factors that leads to success. After the implementation of the VF of TSMC, customers can have all the benefits of in-house fabrication without the risks of capital investments. For example, customers can track their orders and make requirements through the Internet on real time to meet their specific needs. Moreover, customers can get all information in different stages such as product design, order placement, wafer production, yield analysis, and test and assembly, which lowers the entry barrier and transaction cost for its customers. Virtual fabrication is quite a new concept. It could be helpful to understand the different aspects of implementation of virtual fabrication by viewing a particular case in depth. While this methodology has its limitation in generalization findings across business settings, the insights gained could be of value to some different business situations. Much more knowledge may hopefully be added to this subject through accumulating study of case examples. From the experience of TSMC, VF tends to increase the possibility of building exchange relationships and helps strengthen the bonds with customers. Under the uncertain environment, VF is more likely to be a source of competitive advantages, and at the same time, leads to long-term customer relationships. Operational flexibility, however, could moderate the relationship between VF implementation and customer relationships. Furthermore, stable customer relationships could result in higher market and financial performance. Future research could examine the above propositions through empirical data. Some managerial factors may lead to successful VF. In the case of TSMC, knowledge management practice and customer orientation philosophy may be two key successful factors. Knowledge management is the process of capturing a company's collective expertise (Hibbard, 1997) and an attempt to contain the massive amount of information, organize it logically, and make it accessible to the right people, on time (Ginhereau, 1997). The company which invests in knowledge management projects records, sorts, and stores its experience effectively and forms a historical database. From this database its employees draw and analyze information on customer preferences and activities. In TSMC, knowledge management is an important focus in addition to the traditional managerial concerns. Employees in TSMC always learn the newest knowledge from books or from discussions with colleagues. Therefore, the speed of knowledge creation and diffusion is very high. Also, all the knowledge is well sorted, standardized and filed, which allows the knowledge to be diffused widely and preserved for long time. Although the construction of VF is not an easy task, TSMC fulfilled this goal gradually by applying all the knowledge accumulated through time. The relationship between knowledge management and customer relationship building could be another research topic. Another important business philosophy of TSMC is treating customers as partners. It never designs or manufactures its own brandname IC end products to compete against customers but, on the contrary, values customer successes and abilities as its own. As such, constructing a system that is helpful to customer success and to achieve customer satisfaction is the most important goal in TSMC. Moreover, TSMC's Web site offers an efficient communication tool for customers to express their complaints or requirements. All feedbacks are reviewed by customer engineers and are stored in their database. Therefore, TSMC is able to revise VF according to customer opinions. How the management philosophy influences the success of VF implementation and customer relations is also worth researching in the future.