Abstract
Most manufacturing small and medium sized companies (SMEs) deal with constraint issues on a daily basis in terms of missing materials or lack of production capacity. Only a few of these companies have implemented Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems, which enables constraint based planning, as existing APS systems are aimed at the high-end market (e.g. Manugistics and 12) or part of large ERP suites (e.g. Oracle, SAP or BaaN). This means that the infeasible plans are sent to the shop floor, or that the planner has dealt with the constraint issues manually. Both situations are unacceptable in an agile manufacturing company.
This paper deals with planning in agile discrete manufacturing SMEs, with focus on the need for a well-suited planning system. It is argued that the quality of a plan depends on the throughput and the compliance with the overall business model. This leads to the argument that the role of the planning tool ideally is to calculate, while the planner makes all decisions on solving the constraint issues. The interaction between the planner and the planning tool is therefore of high importance, which again leads to new requirements for modern planning tools — and for the planner. Therefore the planning tool must provide the planner of information regarding the status in the production, which constraint issues needs to be solved etc.
The paper falls into four sections. First a comparison of lean and agile manufacturing environments is made to explain the different objectives of the planning. Secondly, a short section explains the current status of SMEs, outlining, how planners cope with constraints on a daily basis. Next is a section, which outlines some key points on, how the agile planning system should work. Lastly, the requirements for an agile planning/scheduling tool are identified.
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Bonde, H., Hvolby, H.H. (2003). Dealing with constraint issues in agile discrete manufacturing companies. In: Jagdev, H.S., Wortmann, J.C., Pels, H.J. (eds) Collaborative Systems for Production Management. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 129. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35698-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35698-3_3
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