An Overall Framework for Production Planning and Scheduling

In this chapter, we present a framework that, we believe, is quite useful for managerial decision making in production situations. Although we develop a single framework, there are important differences in detail with respect to the several broad types of production contexts described in Chapter 2. Thus, Section 13.1 provides a summary statement of these types using the product-process matrix. In Section 13.2, we discuss the proposed decision-making framework that recognizes a natural hierarchy of production decisions. Section 13.3 describes options available to deal with the hierarchy of decisions, including the approach of hierarchical production planning.

13.1 Characteristics of Different Production Processes In Chapter 2, we developed a framework for different production processes that focused on the product-process matrix, which we repeated in the introduction to Section V. In this section, again, we note a subset of the characteristics of these different processes. See Table 13.1. The important point is that management’s focus in different production processes should differ. In the next section, we present a unified framework for production decision making. This framework applies across a variety of processes, but managers should emphasize different decisions depending on the process type under consideration. In continuous processes, a paramount issue should be the coordination of items at a single bottleneck operation, to achieve as high a capacity utilization as possible. In contrast, in assembly processes, the primary concern should be the appropriate coordination of raw materials, components, and so forth, across multiple stages of production. Batch flow operations may have a single bottleneck, and thus managers should focus on managing that resource. Alternatively, they may have a strong similarity to assembly processes so that material coordination should be the key management focus. Job shops tend to have moving bottlenecks, and often have few components and materials, so that the important issue is short-term scheduling.