Production planning for large scale engineering industry a generic approach

Abstract

Integrated production, workforce, and capacity planning are the key factors for the success of any manufacturing industries, achieving the targeted daily production quantity and workforce deployments are also challenging tasks. Production planning is the most effective tool for integrating the above key factors and to overcome the challenges faced in a volatile market, especially in a single-piece flow-based cellular manufacturing large scale engineering industry. Optimization and Operational research techniques are extensively used to derive better solutions and decisions making techniques to any industrial problems. Based on the research gap and historical data from the case study industry (which is located in south-India and it is one of the leading auto electrical part manufacturers in India), where we have identified several significant problems in production flow. At this point, we have suggested relevant production planning objectives which were developed and solved using mathematical model; to achieve our major research objectives of developing the production plan for a product flow line with different product families and with multi-periods. And also we have extended to a generic multi-objective optimization model for multi-stages product flow line. Finally, we have incorporated the above flow values to control any dynamic shop floor situations by using the Decision Support System (DSS). As a result, to achieve the objectives, three major phases for measurement of production planning performances are discussed as follows. In the first phase, a production plan for product flow line (final product are the alternators) is formulated with the help of Linear Programming (LP) to analyze the production planning at multi-products and multi-periods level; it is known as macro-analysis. newline