Over the last several decades, globalization has led to supply chains that have become increasingly complex. Demand for goods and services has exploded in markets that were insignificant just a generation ago. In addition, global sourcing has led to longer and longer lead times on many products, making supply chains increasingly inflexible. These megatrends have made demand forecasting and plan...

This paper contains a detailed description of a thirteen machine COMAU FMS for a company in Torino, Italy. The monthly and daily problems that need to be addressed and the approaches that are suggested to operate this system efficiently are detailed. The trickier probicms and constraints are those of tool management, especially tool loading. Detailed tooling data and their analysis are also pre...

Mutually connected business processes have both logistics process and planning and control components. The Little's theorem describes that for a queuing system in stationary situation, average demand rate multiplied by average number of inventory is average lead time. This paper shows what role a planning and control component plays in forming such a dynamic property of a business process as a ...

We present an improved implementation of the Wagner-Whitin algorithm for economic lot-sizing problems based on the planning-horizon theorem and the Economic- Part-Period concept. The proposed method of this paper reduces the burden of the computations significantly in two different cases. We first assume there is no backlogging and inventory holding and set-up costs are fixed. The second model ...

In a supplier-customer relationship, Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is currently used to monitor the customer’s inventory replenishment. However the integration of VMI implies consequences on the collaboration process that links the different planning processes of each partner. This paper proposes a unified view of the VMI: beyond the short term pull system inventory replenishment, partners hav...

This paper presents a simulation analysis on the effects of robust master production scheduling. Up to now, relatively highly aggregated planning models for robust master production scheduling were regarded and the realizability of the planning results was not considered. This paper analyses a more detailed model for master production scheduling than in previous works. The evaluation of the pla...

We analyze a continuous-time, two-stage production/inventory system. In the first stage, a common intermediate product is produced in batches, and possibly stored. In the second phase, the intermediate product is fabricated into n distinct finished products. Several finished products may be included in a single production batch of limited capacity to exploit economies of scale. We propose a pla...