Some statistical aspects of manpower planning in the civil service

A special feature of modern manpower planning methods is the use of computer-based statistical models, and the Civil Service Department is taking the lead in their development and use for manpower planning in the non-industrial Civil Service. Account is being taken of related data requirements in the development of a new Personnel Record Information System which will replace a range of existing records.Development work in hand covers both the “demand” and “supply” aspects of manpower planning and a bank of generalized “supply” models is in operation. Stationary population, renewal and Markovian principles are involved, and the particular statistical problems of modelling small manpower groups are being met in the development of a “small group” simulation model.     

Applications of neural networks in manufacturing management systems

Abstract. The inherent complexities of modern manufacturing require more sophisticated systems for their management. Neural networks, which are massively parallel interconnected networks, have been shown to have extensive applications in various systems that can be used in manufacturing management. An extensive amount of literature has been published on the applications of neural networks in manufacturing, yet no comprehensive review of this literature to date has been offered. In this paper, we review the concepts and applications of neural networks as they relate to various aspects of manufacturing management.     

An opportunity for system dynamics in manufacturing system modelling

The computer simulation of manufacturing systems is commonly carried out using discrete event simulation (DES). Indeed, there appears to be a lack of applications of continuous simulation methods, particularly system dynamics (SD), despite evidence that this technique is suitable for industrial modelling. This paper investigates whether this is due to a decline in the general popularity of SD, or whether modelling of manufacturing systems represents a missed opportunity for SD. On this basis, the paper first gives a review of the concept of SD and fully describes the modelling technique. Following on, a survey of the published applications of SD in the 1990s is made by developing and using a structured classification approach. From this review, observations are made about the application of the SD method and opportunities for future research are suggested.     

Production planning in practice

The changes and pressures facing the manufacturing and engineering industries today are increasing the importance of effective aggregate manpower and production planning. Several different theoretical optimisation models to tackle this problem have been described in detail in the literature but there have been few applications of them in practice.The reasons for this are many but include: the difficulty in expressing managements' conflicting and mixed objectives in an objective function; the necessity to oversimplify real life systems to enable these methods to be used; the simplistic approach to manpower planning used in these models; the difficulty in gaining managements' acceptance and finally the fact that what management actually wants is a tool to assist them in planning and decision making.What is being used by many managements is a case-study deterministic simulation model. Many companies are adopting this type of model for all types of planning and twelve out of twenty-seven companies visited in a research project described in this paper were using this type of model for aggregate manpower and production planning. It is proving to be an effective management tool and is being readily accepted principally because modern specialised financial modelling languages are enabling these models to be built, understood and used by non-specialist managers.     

Strategic Manufacturing Planning Systems and Their Linkage to Planning System Success

Academics and practitioners alike are focusing more attention on manufacturing strategy after having recognized the important role it plays in shaping the success of industrial firms. Even though research in this area has increased in the last decade, the focus of much of that work has been on the content rather than the process of the manufacturing strategy. Consequently, this study attempts to understand the important elements of the strategic manufacturing planning process and its effectiveness. Borrowing from the extant literature in the fields of strategic management and information systems, we propose a research model that relates strategic manufacturing planning system design to planning system success. Using structured questionnaires, empirical data is collected from over 200 manufacturing executives to test the model hypotheses. Planning process in manufacturing was found to be a bottom‐up approach from a corporate or business perspective, which differs from the top‐down planning process prevalent in strategic information systems planning process. Findings also indicate that greater planning system success in manufacturing is associated with a planning system that combines some “rational” elements (formality, comprehensiveness, control focus, longer horizon) with others that lend adaptability (wider participation and more intense interaction). But the strategic manufacturing planning system is more than just a collection of independent planning characteristics. Instead, it can be viewed as a gestalt planning system whereby planning characteristics move together in affecting overall planning system success.     

MANUFACTURING STRATEGY ON THE “S” CURVE

The concept and techniques of “manufacturing strategy” offer managers the opportunity to use their production function as a strategic weapon in competition, an apparently attractive objective. Yet after about 25 years, the use of manufacturing in corporate strategy (MCS) as a management practice is not widespread. In contrast, however, in academic literature it appears to be flourishing and rapidly growing in popularity. This paper seeks to answer this apparent paradox, beginning with the history of MCS as it was developed as a theory of design to enable a manufacturing system to be focused on a key competitive task. Common criticisms of MCS, such as “tradeoffs,” “focus” and “undynamic,” are examined and refuted as valid reasons for its only modest usage. Instead, three “new” problems in the MCS concept and its techniques are suggested as genuine needs for the completion of the theory and for its becoming more universally understood and used by industrial managers.     

Production planning and control in automated manufacturing systems

Automated manufacturing systems (AMSs) have the potential for providing a high level of manufacturing performance. Owing to the high cost of capital investment, a high utilization level of AMSs with the help of suitable production planning and control (PPC) is feature of AMSs. Realizing the potential of PPC in AMSs, an attempt has been made to review the available techniques/methods for solving the problems of production planning, control and scheduling in AMSs. The need for further research on PPC of AMSs is brought to the fore along with future research directions.     

Cloud manufacturing system for sheet metal processing

Abstract

Cloud computing is changing the way industries and enterprises run their businesses. Cloud manufacturing is emerging as an approach to transform the traditional manufacturing business model, while helping the manufacturer to align production efficiency with its business strategy, and creating intelligent factory networks that enable collaboration across the whole enterprise. Many production planning and control (PPC) problems are essentially optimisation problems, where the objective is to develop a plan that meets the demand at minimum cost or maximum profit. Because the underlying optimisation problem will vary in the different business and operation phases, it is important to think about optimisation in a dynamic mechanism and in a number of interlinked sub-problems at the same time. Cloud manufacturing has the potential to offer decision support as a service and medium of communication in PPC. To solve these problems and produce collaboration across the supply chain, this paper provides an overview of the state of the art in cloud manufacturing and presents a model of cloud-based production planning and production system for sheet metal processing.     

Simulation-based performance assessment of master planning approaches in semiconductor manufacturing

Semiconductor manufacturing is confronted with a large number of products whose mix is changing over time, heterogeneous fabrication processes, re-entrant flows of material, and different sources of environmental and system uncertainty. In this context, the mid-term production planning approach, i.e., master planning, typically does not capture the entire complexity of the shop-floor. It deals with an aggregated representation of the production system. There is a need for evaluating the planning algorithm in use while taking the execution level into account. Therefore, we introduce in this paper a simulation-based framework that allows for modeling the behavior of the market demand and the production system. An appropriate performance assessment methodology is proposed. The performance of two heuristic approaches for master planning in semiconductor manufacturing, a genetic algorithm and a rule-based assignment procedure, is evaluated within a rolling horizon setting while considering demand and execution uncertainty. A reduced discrete-event simulation model is used to mimic a one-stage network of wafer fabrication facilities. The results of simulation experiments are discussed.     

Replenishment Analysis in Distribution Requirements Planning*

Most research on lot sizing has been for the case of a manufacturing system. In this paper, analogous issues are studied for a distribution network. Specifically, we consider the choice of shipment quantities within distribution requirements planning (DRP). A simulation model of DRP in a multi-echelon, rolling-schedule environment is used to examine, in conditions of both certain and uncertain demand, the performance of five lot-sizing rules. We conducted a full-factorial experiment in which four additional parameters were varied: distribution network structure (two options), demand distribution (three options), forecast error distribution (three options), and ordering cost (three values), as suggested by the consulting study which motivated our research. We found that for DRP, contrary to the “shop floor” wisdom on MRP, the choice of lot-sizing method can be important. Generally the Silver-Meal and Bookbinder-Tan heuristics were significantly better than the other methods.     

Process and quality control issues in the automated manufacturing of discrete parts

The techniques of quality control have been developed over a number of decades, during which the technology of manufacturing was essentially static in terms of control and strategy. Advances within the past decade have led to substantial changes in the manufacturing environment. Changes in the extent, type, and breadth of application of automation call into question some of the basic assumptions of classical quality control. Changes in the mode of manufacturing, such as JIT and emphasis on smaller lot sizes, raise further questions as to the validity of classical quality control in the modern manufacturing environment. This paper addresses some of the questions raised by recent advances in manufacturing and identifies issues for research in quality and process control in the modern manufacturing.     

Corporate planning a review of questions and answers

This paper is about corporate planning, seen primarily but not exclusively from the viewpoint of operational research. The reasons for the rise of interest in corporate planning are examined, as are the contributions which O.R. has made or can make to corporate planning problems. An abstract discussion of these problems concentrates on those posed by increasing “connectedness” in the environment. After comparing the responses of the “commonsense manager”, the model-oriented operational researcher, and the cybernetician, the question is posed: “How can the operational researcher or planner enhance the adaptive capability of his organization?” A case study illustrates one possible form of solution, the “modular” approach; and another, the “zoom-lens” is outlined. The relevance of global system modelling to the widening problems of the corporate planner is also considered, and related to the concepts previously discussed.     

Simulation optimization through direct search for multi-objective manufacturing systems

Simulation modelling has been one of the most widely used techniques for analysing complex manufacturing systems. In this paper, we propose a direct search algorithm expanded from the Hooke-Jecves pattern search to systematically and efficiently locate satisfactory solutions for multi-objective simulation models. The user-specified goals can be precise and/or fuzzy. Heuristic rules stemming from the simulation result of resource statistics are incorporated into the Hooke-Jeeves pattern search. The proposed heuristic rules make the search procedure effective regardless of different initial points and various bounded ranges of decision variables. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is suitable for analysing complex manufacturing systems, in which multiple objectives and multiple decision variables are encountered.     

Important Strategic and Tactical Manufacturing Issues in the 1990s*

This paper reports the identification and ranking of major manufacturing issues that American manufacturing managers and academics must focus on and resolve in the 1990s to be competitive on a global basis. Vice-presidents of manufacturing from over 75 companies across the United States were asked in a Delphi study to rank the key strategic and tactical issues facing American manufacturing in the next three to five years. Based on three rounds of a Delphi study, quality management, manufacturing strategy, and process technology emerged as the top ranked strategic issues. The top ranked tactical issues were quality control, manufacturing planning and control systems, and work force supervision. These issues were valid across diverse industry groups, since the industrial and educational background of the respondents was shown to have no impact on the final consensus rankings and opinions reported in this paper. Factor analysis of the responses by the panel revealed that certain issues tend to be consistently viewed together, and were interpreted accordingly to provide insights into the ranking of issues. Apart from building a consensus among experts on key manufacturing issues of present and future importance, this study can also be helpful for setting future academic research and pedagogical priorities for the field of production and operations management.     

EXPLODING THE MYTH: DO ALL QUALITY MANAGEMENT PRACTICES CONTRIBUTE TO SUPERIOR QUALITY PERFORMANCE?

In his landmark article on total quality management, Powell (1995) lamented the lack of large scale studies investigating quality management practices and performance. This study begins to fill that void using a large, random sample of manufacturing sites. The results show that quality practices can be categorized into nine dimensions. However, not all of them contribute to superior quality outcomes. “Employee commitment,” “shared vision,” and “customer focus” combine to yield a positive correlation with quality outcomes. Conversely, other “hard” quality practices, such as “benchmarking,” “cellular work teams,” “advanced manufacturing technologies,” and “close supplier relations” do not contribute to superior quality outcomes.     

SIMULATION AND SEWAGE

Faced with increasing pressures on environmental issues, municipal and industrial planners must incorporate changing technology into planning processes. Conventional approaches to wastewater treatment plant design severely limit the ability of the designer to evaluate alternative design configurations. This paper suggests that computer simulation techniques can provide solutions to many of the problems which confront a designer. A simulation model of a hypothetical sewage treatment plant is described, and some of the design trade-offs that can be evaluated with the model are presented.     

DISAGGREGATION IN MANUFACTURING AND SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS: SURVEY OF PROBLEMS AND RESEARCH

This paper addresses a class of problems, referred to as “disaggregation problems,” which lie between planning at the top level and the more detailed decisions of inventory control and scheduling at the bottom level. Most real-world problems are sufficiently complex to warrant a sequential or top-down approach to problem solving. However, researchers have paid scant attention to disaggregation until very recently. The resulting lack of an interfacing mechanism diminishes the utility of solution procedures for aggregate planning, inventory control, and scheduling. In order to draw attention to this gap, a taxonomy of disaggregation problems is developed for both manufacturing and service organizations. The purpose is to identify and classify problems, describe representative research, and identify unresolved issues.     

Installing a computerized planning system in Ghana

As part of a World Bank funded project to rehabilitate the export industries of a West African country, a study was undertaken into the methods of corporate planning and the systems of reporting management information for the government owned organization responsible for the distribution and marketing of the country's main agricultural export. Although many of the familiar problems were faced in attempting to introduce modern management techniques into a Third World country, considerable success in implementation was achieved by using a microcomputer with modern business software. Local staff were trained in the use of the modelling software and management information reports were prepared in graphical format to highlight the results for top management.     

Total production control

The new requirements for enterprise flexibility, quality improvement, costs and throughput limes reduction cannot be achieved by using traditional approaches. While US and European industry developed the grand CIM, FMS, CAD/CAM and MRP II projects, Japan introduced just-in-time and lean production, not to demonstrate the possibilities of the new technology but to expose operational inefficiencies and waste in the manufacturing process. The main CIM effort was in the flexibility and productivity improvement, bin its implementation stressed above all the technical aspects of the factory integration and the most flexible production factor, people, remained in the background. The new technology must be implemented into the organizational framework that uses and develops the skills, knowledge and creativity of the human resources. People in the production process need a new kind of decision support in the rapidly changing business environment. A new concept, total production control (TPC), that is a reaction to the present manufacturing problems will be presented. TPC integrates many methods and tools for production system analysis and improvement, production system design and production planning and control. This concept emphasizes a preventive aspect of the problem solution in the production process and supports a production manager at the three time views: past (archive and statistical database); present (shopfloor data capture and production progress monitoring); and future (simulation and modelling tools).