ABSTRACT

Everything begins with an idea followed by a concept, development, production, and finally delivery to the ultimate customer (consumer). Whereas one can indeed verbalize the process and in fact it is a very easy process to do, the reality of implementing all of these stages is that it is very difficult to harmonize them and bring them to a conclusion on time. To put this in perspective, think of the typical automobile, which has over 12,000 individual parts, yet they all have to be planned for production on a specific automobile. An even more incredible statistic is the over one million individual parts of a typical plane that have to be planned for production on a specific plane.