Production Planning And Scheduling Systems Management Essay

This chapter is to discuss about the definition and overview of the production planning and scheduling systems, the functions of production planning and scheduling systems, the impact implemented production planning and scheduling systems and the benefits implemented production planning and scheduling systems.

2.2 DEFINITION

The production planning and scheduling systems is the project management applications that implemented in organizations to planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of the resources for a limit period of time to complete specific objective and common goal in project. Production planning and scheduling system are the efficient project management theories that use as the decision making at many organizations. In manufacturing organizations, the implemented planning and scheduling systems play crucial role on manufacturing as well as in service industries. These forms of decision-making play important role in procurement and production

The project management applications are the tool that use to solve problems in the field of production planning and scheduling are become more widespread. The planning and scheduling systems functions in organization rely on mathematical techniques to allocate limited resources. This allocation of resources has to be done in such a way that the company optimizes its objectives and achieves its goals. Objectives can be take many different forms, such as minimizing the time to complete all activity, minimizing the number of activity that are completed after the committed due dates, and so on.

2.3 OVERVIEW

Regarding to Protougal and Robb (2000), they was showed scheduling theory are relevant few setting and scheduling research can improve the production planning and practice. Other researchers like Mckay and Wiers (1999) had similar observation with Protougal and Robb (2000). Mckay and Wiers (1999) state the concept of the planning and scheduling theories in industries was rare at manufacturing organizations. Through those researchers, it can be prove the planning and scheduling systems play the important role in decision making in production goods and services activities to structuring and simplifying the process of constructing real-time problem solving, equipment, focusing specially on task of production planning and scheduling.

Classen and Malstrom (1982) state the production and scheduling provide high critical parts of a manufacturing system to complete the manufacturing activities. Those state out the important of planning and scheduling in manufacturing activities to achieve the objective. In the current competitive environment, with global markets, increasing global competition and shorter production life cycles, the manufacturing organizations implemented the production planning and scheduling systems to meet the manufacturing objectives such as customer’s satisfaction, manufacturing efficiency, and inventory investment.

Nowadays, effective planning and scheduling has become a necessity for survival in marketplace. Research (Advanced Manufacturing Research, Inc., 1996) has show that a organization with an effective production planning and scheduling can achieve in reduction by 10-15 percent in production costs, reduction by 8-10 percent in inventory costs and increase by 30 percent in “on time” deliveries to the customers. Through this research, the production planning and scheduling can better customer service, reduction in time to complete tasks, increase production, and use resources more effective.

Moreover, many researchers have written about the expert system in production planning and scheduling and potential benefits of them (Mertens and Kanet 1986; Liebowitz and Lightfoot, 1987; Kanet and Adelsberger, 1987; Deal et al., 1992; De Toni et al., 1996; Pham and Pham, 1999; Li et al., 2000; Metaxiotis et al., 2001). According to these researchers, expert system in planning and scheduling can help manufacturing to cut costs by reducing waste. Besides that, it can be better consistency to decision making and improve quality of products. As the result, it directly can increase manufacturing organizations performance.

Today, the expert system in production planning and scheduling can be accepted that the project management applications is an effective way to achieve the manufacturing activities more effectively and efficiently. (Advanced Manufacturing Research, Inc., 1996). Currently, all the manufacturing organizations in the world have their own planning and scheduling in their project department. It not just implement in the manufacturing department, it can implement at other department such as production, operation, purchasing department and so on. Even planning and scheduling system implement at different departments, but these departments have same objective to achieve common project goal in organizations.

According to Hax and Meal (1975) and Vollman et al., (1997), the tasks of the production planning and scheduling systems include planning and control of the manufacturing process and related resources such as material, machines, workforce and other. Both of the production planning and scheduling system and the manufacturing process are designed to meet the market needs and to support the overall organization strategy. The production planning and scheduling system can provides information to efficiently manage the flow of material and effectively utilize the work force and other resources. These functions to ensure all the manufacturing activities run in good condition and smoothly, which achieve zero-defective in the manufacturing activities.

Other perspective on planning and scheduling, the research has also been dominated by mathematical modeling and algorithmic solutions such as linear programming, simulation, or other optimization-based algorithms. These mathematical approaches culminated in the implementation of an optimization-based production planning and scheduling system in Haris Corporation, which reported improvement in system performance and work efficiency (Leachman et al., 1996) to achieve the project objective.

2.4 FUNCTIONS

In manufacturing, the jobs often have to be processed on the machines in work center in a given order. The processing of jobs may sometimes be delayed if certain machines are busy. Unexpected event on the shop floor, such as machine breakdowns or longer processing times, must be considered in the planning and scheduling systems. Therefore, the organization must developed an environment, detailed schedule of the tasks to performed to helps maintain efficiency and control of the operation.

The production planning and scheduling system as the decision making in shop floor is use for clearly what the impact detailed schedule of the tasks, helps to maintain the operation and complete tasks on time without waste. Decision making at this higher level may impact the more detailed scheduling process directly. Below figure 1 show the planning and scheduling in information flow in a manufacturing.

Production planning, master scheduling

Order, demand

Forecasts

Capacity status

Quantities, due dates

Material requirement, planning capacity planning

Material

requirements

Shop orders,

Scheduling Release dates

constraints

Scheduling and rescheduling

Detailed

scheduling

Schedule Schedule

Dispatching Performance

Shop

order

Shop-floor

management

Data Job loading

collection

Shop-floor

Figure 1 Information flow diagram in manufacturing system (Michael L. Pinedo, 2005)

2.5 IMPACT

Reviews of the researchers above, the failure implement the production planning and scheduling has reaching affects in organization’s performance involves the resources allocation over time for manufacture goods, different aspects deterministic models, stochastic models and various forms of uncertainties. The forms of uncertainties on production planning and scheduling are variation of processing time, machine breakdowns, rush order and so on. These situations can bring impact on the production planning and scheduling. The planner have to prepare the new schedule for the production operation and this problem will cause can’t complete the task on time.

Besides that, some researchers have found the impact from human, organizational and management aspects to address the planning and scheduling problem. In human aspects, it was now widely accepted within the academic world and industry that human planners and schedulers were essential elements for an effective planning and scheduling process (Crawford and Wiers, 2001). Regarding to Sanderson’s (1989), he review concluded that advanced manufacturing systems needed human to operator. In technological aspects, the technology in the planned and scheduled production systems had to deal with uncertainties or technical design failures in the production process. Another influence from technology was through the design of the scheduling software system.

For the organizational aspects, the planner and scheduler participates weekly production meetings with top management. The production job-shops or process changes immediately by the top management’s decision because of the rush order and cause tasks can’t complete on time. Another influence from organizational was scheduling process. The planner and scheduler exerted considerable influence on the activities of the production, sales and purchase department. As the result, planning and scheduling process was influenced by human, technological, and organizational aspects (MacCarthy et al., 2001; Berglund and Karltun, 2005).

In addition, the problem of lot sizing and scheduling models can be found by Drexl and Kimms (1997) or Potts and Van Wassenhove (1992). The model differ by taking into account the following main aspects of the problem: capacity constraints, presence of backlogs, presence of set-up costs and their sequence dependence, number of production stages (single or multistage problems) and number of considered products (Clark and Staggemeier, 2001).

In modeling of lot sizing and scheduling problems, the terms are often used are macro-period and micro-period. The macro-period term is represented a long time slot like one week to solve the lot sizing and scheduling problem. The micro-period term is micro-periods is represented short time slots like hours and shifts only. The lot sizing and scheduling problems attract a lot of attention of researchers. Many approaches have been used to solve the problem to achieve the objective of tasks.

Other failure implement the production planning and scheduling system is process of allocating resources. A proper allocation of resources enable to manufacturing organization to optimize its objectives and achieve its goals. Besides that, complexity of the tasks also the problem failure implement the production planning and scheduling in manufacturing organization such as various machine environments, many detail of processing characteristics and operating constraints, several uncertainties and different performance.

In general impact in modern manufacturing organizations, the production planning and scheduling systems problems occur influenced by the human, technological, and organizational aspect in manufacturing organization. There are many different combinations of machine configurations and consequently of production system such as flow shop, job show, batch shop, flexible assembly and so on. The percentage failure implements production planning and scheduling in modern manufacturing organizations increase.

2.6 BENEFITS

The requirement by customer in the market places increase. For fulfill customer orders and needs, the implementation production planning and scheduling system as the decision making is very important to complete the tasks or project on time within lower price and satisfy the customer’s needs in the marketplaces. The organization adopts a make-to-order business model for manufacturing service. The manufacturing organization plan and schedule the production operation activities to fulfill customer order and realize agile manufacturing.

Many researchers have proved the project management applications: production planning and scheduling systems that beneficial to manufacturing organization. Regarding the DaimlerChrysler, he state can lowered product cost, decreased development time, and proved vehicle design. Other researchers like Hewlett-Packard had shown increase customer satisfaction, and with the use integrated project, were able to lower project cost, shorten development time, and improve system integration and production design.

Furthermore, it would show that the building production and scheduling systems in affecting the production activities and help to improve the productivity. As the result, the production planning and scheduling systems play the important role in manufacturing organizations that beneficial to manufacturing activities to increase performance of organizations.

In general, the production planning and scheduling systems can affect overall the production activities on the manufacturing organization if compare with manufacturing organization without implemented the project management applications in production activities. With the project management applications, it can assist many aspects such as reduction labor, better production services, reduction in time to complete the tasks, increasing production, more effective use of resources and so on. Meanwhile, it also can help the manufacturing organization keeps going improve the model of production planning and scheduling system in the production line to produce the lower cost but high quality goods in the market place. It directly can get a lot of benefits in the market competition.