Predicting complaints in semiconductor order fulfilment with machine learning

Patrick Moder and Kai Hoberg

International Journal of Production Research, 2025, vol. 63, issue 13, 4776-4799

Abstract: Many customers complain when informed that their order will not be fulfilled as originally confirmed, while other customers may be able to tolerate deviations. However, for suppliers, such complaints can be an early indicator of bad publicity, customer churn, and lost sales; and suppliers can prioritise orders to avoid these negative consequences. Ideally, they would know in advance if any order fulfilment change will trigger a customer complaint. To analyse how suppliers can predict these infrequent events in a business-to-business context, we leverage machine learning models on a large real-world dataset from a global semiconductor manufacturer. Our findings demonstrate that extreme gradient boosted trees effectively address the prediction problem. We explore the impact on model performance for different sampling approaches and cutoff values, as tuning the decision threshold is a meaningful calibration strategy before practical implementation. Our feature importance analysis provides evidence that high order fulfilment quality lowers complaint tendencies. Bridging the gap between advanced analytics and customer behaviour prediction, our research contributes to understanding the influence of subpar order fulfilment on customer satisfaction and offers insights into efficient order management despite disruptions. Our empirical study lays the groundwork for proactive supply chain operations when order fulfilment is at risk.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2024.2442548

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