The basic tasks of a business are straight‐forward – getting and keeping customers and making profits, both set within the context of the short and long term. Explicit in these is not only a need for marketing and manufacturing to work well in themselves but to work well together. Companies,...

Heuristic methods are presented for scheduling telephone traffic exchange operators to meet demand that varies over a 24-hour operating period. Two types of heuristics are described (1) for determining the work shift types to be considered in preparing an operator shift schedule and (2) for...

The movement of workers among machines is a tactic often employed by job shop managers to break bottlenecks and smooth the flow of work. Despite its common occurrence in industrial practice, the problem has only recently received attention in the management science literature. The purposes of...

This paper describes the use of Biased Sampling to solve an inventory planning problem at a firm which produces plastic coated steel products. In this application, the Biased Sampling solutions provided an estimate of the inventory investment savings to be obtained from a major capital...

The stability of the Master Production Schedule (MPS) is a critical issue in managing production operations with a Material Requirements Planning System. One method of achieving stability is to freeze some portion or all of the MPS. While freezing the MPS can limit the number of schedule...

This paper is concerned with the problem of maintaining open order due dates in job shops that plan and schedule their operations using Material Requirements Planning (MRP) methodology. Two different techniques for dealing with open order due date changes are analyzed using customer service...

Critical Ratio scheduling has been implemented in job shops that manufacture component parts for stock replenishment as well as direct customer orders. Proponents of this technique argue that scheduling performance is improved by gathering and processing two different types of operating...

1. Perspectives on disaggregation -- 2. Disaggregation in manufacturing and service organizations: survey of problems and research -- 3. Toward a theory of hierarchical coordination and conflict -- 4. An MSA view of disaggregation -- 5. Hierarchical planning systems: a production application --...

In the column Notes About Authors in Management Science's October 1975 issue, Vithala R. Rao's biographic paragraph was inadvertantly substituted for that of Vittal Rao. The correct paragraph follows.

This paper has two purposes: (1) to propose a new way of conceptualizing job-shop-like manufacturing systems and (2) to suggest how this conceptualization might be applied in the development of planning and control procedures. The concept of "work flow structure" is developed and methods for...