Krish Dharma, strategic advisor for the SEMI Supply Chain Management (SCM) Initiative, explains how the semiconductor industry is moving from piecemeal insight to coordinated resilience by building a capability-driven blueprint that allows companies to anticipate disruption, improve capital efficiency, and respond more quickly without compromising competitive advantage.
The global semiconductor supply chain has entered a new phase. Disruption is no longer an occasional shock, but a structural situation shaped by geopolitical realignment, AI-driven demand growth, climate risk, and unprecedented capital concentration.
While individual companies have invested heavily in digital tools and internal resilience, the broader ecosystem still struggles to consistently respond to systemic risks. Data remains fragmented across tiers, reliability is limited, and decisions are often made in isolation. Adjustments typically begin after disruptions have already begun, leading to amplified volatility, unbalanced capacity investment, slow response times, and inefficient use of capital.
The problem is not a lack of competency at the corporate level. There is no neutral, global, industry-level operating model that allows companies to anticipate disruption and act on the same page without compromising confidentiality or competitive advantage.
The need for an industry operating model
Bettina Weiss, SEMI Chief of Staff and Corporate Strategy, said: “Systemic risks require systemic responses.
“No company, regardless of size or sophistication, can alone manage geopolitical exposures, critical material dependencies, and demand shocks that propagate throughout the value chain.”
What the industry needs is a shared framework that defines how coordination works: how signals are securely exchanged and received across the value chain, how insights are developed, and how readiness is built over time. This is the role of OSCAR (Open Supply Chains for Agility and Resilience).
OSCAR is a long-term industry-driven functional framework being developed as part of the global SEMI Supply Chain Management Initiative and is designed to provide a foundation for ecosystem-level coordination. This establishes a common operating model that allows enterprises to maintain autonomy while benefiting from collective visibility, foresight, and preparedness.
Why Oscar?
The industry is at a tipping point. There are six main reasons that justify the need for an industry-wide SCM blueprint.
Make adjustments executable
For coordination to be robust, it must be designed as a system rather than a collection of ad hoc initiatives. Therefore, OSCAR is based on a clear execution logic that connects intent to action.
It starts with sharing and articulating the strategy: the problem being solved and the outcomes that matter to the industry. These include readiness for growth, readiness for disruption, the ability to respond to rapid change, increased capital efficiency, and sustained profitability. This strategic framework is time-aware and distinguishes between short-term actions and long-term structural changes. Strategies are translated into capabilities, or key capabilities that an ecosystem must develop in order to function effectively under uncertainty. This includes sensing risk in near real-time, harmonizing predictions across tiers, modeling scenarios before disruptions occur, and developing multi-tier visibility with context rather than raw transparency. These capabilities are intentionally prescriptive enough to allow for benchmarking and standardization, yet flexible enough to be adopted in a variety of ways by actors across the value chain.
Capabilities only become a reality if they are supported by defined processes and protocols. This layer establishes how collaboration happens: how data is securely shared, common data models and ontologies, how signals are interpreted, and how escalation occurs in the event of disruption. Without this discipline, even the best analysis remains disconnected from action.
Technology then enables scale by turning shared functionality into something the ecosystem can use. A fundamental requirement is visibility, bringing together macroeconomic indicators, market trends, demand signals, and supply constraints into a consistent, industry-level view. These signals are aggregated through Conductor™, the first platform designed to operate OSCAR. Developed by SEMI and strategic partner Beebolt, Conductor provides a neutral, controlled environment for secure signal exchange, shared visibility, and scenario exploration. This is not a standalone product or centralized system. Rather, it serves as an execution layer that transforms OSCAR’s operating model into a practical workflow, allowing multiple tools and platforms to coexist within a common framework.
Finally, governance ensures continuity and trust. Clear decision rights, work structures, funding models, and roadmaps allow for continued alignment across individual leaders and business cycles. Governance is what transforms collaboration from good intentions to durable systems.
From signals to insights without centralizing decision making
Within this operating model, the industry aligns around a set of core capabilities that move coordination from awareness to readiness. These capabilities include signal integration, visibility across demand, supply, materials, and logistics, simulating future scenarios, predicting changes in demand and risk, and optimizing response options.
OSCAR provides a functional framework that enables the ecosystem to consistently generate insights across strategic, tactical, and operational domains.
Strategic insights support long-term investment and capacity decisions. Tactical insights improve supply and demand balance in the medium term. Operational insights enable faster and more coordinated responses to short-term disruptions. The decision is left to individual companies. OSCAR enhances all of these decisions by improving the quality, timeliness, and integrity of the information behind them.
Recruitment is an important test
The success of this model will not be determined by its conceptual elegance, but by its widespread global industry adoption. We have seen time and time again that coordination efforts fail when they are framed too narrowly as supply chain initiatives or technology programs, rather than as holistic, comprehensive approaches.
For OSCAR to be successful, it must be communicated in the language of business leaders. CEOs need to understand how collective preparedness protects long-term growth and geopolitical resilience. CFOs need to understand how greater foresight can reduce stuck assets and improve capital efficiency. Operators need to be clear about how their models support execution under volatility.
Momentum is built through tangible progress, not abstract vision. Early practical milestones, realized through platforms such as Conductor™, demonstrate feasibility and value while maintaining the framework’s long-term goals.
call to action
The semiconductor industry has reached a point where resiliency can no longer be treated as a competitive differentiator. It is a collective requirement.
OSCAR provides a path forward through shared capabilities, trusted governance, and practical execution, rather than mandates and centralization. The next stage depends on active participation. Companies large and small must work to define capabilities, experiment with collaborative processes, and contribute to industry standards that will shape how ecosystems operate under prolonged uncertainty. Join the OSCAR working group or sign up for early access to Conductor.
The question is no longer whether systemic adjustments are needed, but whether the industry will intentionally build them before the next disruption forces them to improvise again.
About the author
Krish Dharma has a 40-year track record of driving innovation and transformation in the electronics industry, with a focus on supply chain operations, information technology, ecosystem collaboration, and enterprise business transformation that drives profitable revenue growth. He has held multiple senior supply chain and operations management positions and worked for a wide range of electronics companies including semiconductors, contract manufacturers, and consumer electronics.
This article will also be published in the quarterly magazine issue 25.
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