Takes a fresh look at the nature of the problem of allocating costs and control processes for a variable product mix. Adopts a novel approach called the “Unit of Production Effort” method. The method creates a common measure throughout the production process which can then be used in all...

Addresses the dynamic, continual‐improvement nature of the JIT implementation process. Learning curves are incorporated to analyse the impact of continual reduction of processing time variation over time. The results provide valuable information on the relationship between the level of...

Reports development and simulation of real‐time dispatching procedures, for flexible manufacturing cells (FMCs) in constant production circumstances, where a fixed set of part types is processed continuously while maintaining constant ratios between quantities needed of each part type. Five...

Discusses the variety of production control situations within process industries. Following a literature review, a typology is introduced which discriminates between two extreme types of process industries: batch/mix and process/flow businesses. Reviews the research in production and inventory...

Presents a hierarchical production planning (HPP) model that integrates aggregate‐type planning, family disaggregate planning, lot‐sizing, job scheduling and evaluation of the final production plans into a complete planning and scheduling system. In‐corporation of a simple heuristic...

Small manufacturing companies make up the base industrial backbone of many countries including the USA. Even though CIM is generally believed to help manufacturers to compete globally, small companies are ot able to adopt the technology owing to CIM′s substantial investments and its associated...

Analyses the problems of production scheduling in the dairy product industry where variety and sell‐by date constraints have to be taken into account. Using the formalization of priorities as a basis, attempts to demonstrate that a thorough understanding of the relation between a formal...

Considers a class of control systems known as generalized kanban control systems (GKCS) which can be used to implement a pull control mechanism in a manufacturing system. In a GKCS, the production system is decomposed into stages, where each stage consists of a production sub‐system. There are...

Successful implementations of scheduling techniques in practice are scarce. Not only do daily disturbances lead to a gap between theory and practice, but also the extent to which a scheduling technique can adequately model the processes on the shopfloor, and the extent to which the optimization...

Buffers of work throughout a manufacturing facility enhance throughput. They protect a workstation against variations in processing times and against machine breakdowns of upstream workstations. However, buffer management is still thought to be an open problem: first there is no algebraic way of...