Bernard Grabot

Survey paper: A survey on the recent research literature on ERP systems

The research literature on ERP systems has exponentially grown in recent years. In a domain, where new concepts and techniques are constantly introduced, it is therefore, of interest to analyze the recent trends of this literature, which is only partially included in the research papers published. Therefore, we have chosen to primarily analyze the literature of the last 2 years (2003 and 2004), on the basis of a classification according to six categories: implementation of ERP; optimisation of ERP; management through ERP; the ERP software; ERP for supply chain management; case studies. This survey confirms that the research on ERP systems is still a growing field, but has reached some maturity. Different research communities address this area from various points of view. Among the research axes that are now active, we can, especially, notice a growing interest on the post-implementation phase of the projects, on the customization of ERP systems, on the sociological aspects of the implementation, on the interoperability of the ERP with other systems and on the return on investment of the implementations.

Dispatching rules in scheduling Dispatching rules in scheduling: a fuzzy approach

Abstract Job-shop scheduling through simulation uses various kinds of dispatching rules such as SPT or the slack time rule. Each of these rules aims at satisfying a single criterion although workshop management is a multi-criteria problem. This paper proposes a way to use fuzzy logic in order to build aggregated rules allowing to obtain a compromise between the satisfaction of several criteria. When the criteria of performance change with the evolution of the production environment, these aggregated rules can be parametrized in order to modify the respective influence of the elementary rules they are composed of.

Implementation and optimisation of ERP systems: A better integration of processes, roles, knowledge and user competencies

The implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is nowadays a key issue for companies. The problems that can appear during their integration, which is always a difficult task, are nowadays better identified, even if their origins are often multiple and complex. This study focuses on the integration of the human resource characteristics in business processes, which is a key issue for the ERP adoption and optimisation phases. In that purpose, it is suggested to better adapt business processes to human actors by explicitly taking into account concepts like the role, competence and knowledge of human resources. It is shown on a practical case-the implementation of PeopleSoft(TM) in a university-how these concepts may optimise ERP implementations by better identifying the requirements and possibilities of the workforce, with the final goal of increasing the efficiency and acceptability of the system to be implemented.

Short-term manpower management in manufacturing systems: new requirements and DSS prototyping

The short-term planning and scheduling of discrete manufacturing systems has mostly focused in the past on the management of machines, implicitly considered as the critical resources of the workshops. Some of the present schedulers claim to also manage human resources, but perform most of the time a local allocation of operators to machines, these operators having regular working hours. However, it seems clear that the workforce has a specificity that should be better taken into account by short-term planning facilities. Moreover, the variability of the weekly working hours through the year will shortly become a rule and not anymore an exception. On the base of a questionnaire answered by 19 French companies of different sizes and industrial sectors, we have tried to identify more precisely some industrial requirements concerning the short-term management of human resources. The growing interest in annualised hours together with the lack of software tools that allow to implement it practically is one of the results of this questionnaire. We suggest in this article the specification of a decision support system for short-term manpower management under annualised hours, taking into account the competence of the operators. A software prototype has been developed according to these specifications; the results of a simple but representative example are described.

Generating knowledge in maintenance from Experience Feedback

Knowledge is nowadays considered as a significant source of performance improvement, but may be difficult to identify, structure, analyse and reuse properly. A possible source of knowledge is in the data and information stored in various modules of industrial information systems, like CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems) for maintenance. In that context, the main objective of this paper is to propose a framework allowing to manage and generate knowledge from information on past experiences, in order to improve the decisions related to the maintenance activity. In that purpose, we suggest an original Experience Feedback process dedicated to maintenance, allowing to capitalize on past activities by (i) formalizing the domain knowledge and experiences using a visual knowledge representation formalism with logical foundation (Conceptual Graphs); (ii) extracting new knowledge thanks to association rules mining algorithms, using an innovative interactive approach; and (iii) interpreting and evaluating this new knowledge thanks to the reasoning operations of Conceptual Graphs. The suggested method is illustrated on a case study based on real data dealing with the maintenance of overhead cranes.

Formalisation and use of competencies for industrial performance optimisation: A survey

For many years, industrial performance has been implicitly considered as deriving from the optimisation of technological and material resources (machines, inventories, etc.), made possible by centralized organisations. The topical requirements for reactive and flexible industrial systems have progressively reintroduced the human workforce as the main source of industrial performance. Making this paradigm operational requires the identification and careful formalisation of the link between human resource and industrial performance, through concepts like skills, competencies or know-how. This paper provides a general survey of the formalisation and integration of competence-oriented concepts within enterprise information systems and decision systems, aiming at providing new methods and tools for performance management.

Integration of uncertain and imprecise orders in the MRP method

Nowadays, one of the main difficulties of Production Management is to take into account the increasing uncertainty of the customer demand. In an MRP system, this uncertainty is mainly managed at middle term and through successive actualizations of the planning. We suggest in this paper a way to explicitly model the uncertainty and imprecision of the demand allowing to pass through all the MRPII steps (Material Requirement Planning, Load Planning, Scheduling). This method, named Fuzzy-MRP (F-MRP) allows to visualize at each step a much more rich information for the decision makers, taking into account not only the certain data but also a quantification of the various eventualities that may arise. Decisions requiring a long preparation (sub-contracting, order of components, increase of capacity, etc.) can so be considered earlier, on the base of quantified data.

Sales and operations planning: the supply chain pillar

In the present ever-changing environment, sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a key process for providing visibility to the enterprise. Besides, it supports a transversal decision process, which co-ordinates different functions either in the company or between companies, in a supply chain (SC) environment. In the literature, S&OP models are mainly focusing on sales, production and inventory. This paper proposes a wider S&OP model built with three levels (sales, operations and supply). It provides a better support for integration inside the company, but also for integration of the company in the SC. Some simulation results are presented, describing the S&OP propagation along a SC, and the related collaboration requirements to be satisfied between the networked companies.

Adding decision support to workflow systems by reusable standard software components

Industrial information systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are increasingly comprehensive and integrated. Nevertheless, satisfying all the user requirements regarding information processing or decision support within a unique tool seems still to be unrealistic. As a consequence, being able to quickly provide the users with additional pieces of software for supporting specific decisions remains more than ever a topic of interest. Specific developments take time, are costly, have usually low reliability and are often poorly integrated with the main information system. In order to address these drawbacks, we suggest a structure and the first elements of a toolbox aimed at allowing an easier development of additional pieces of information/decision support system (DSS) by reuse of standard software components. This toolbox allows the implementation of workflow and groupware facilities and the communication between modules is achieved through a database which provides the integration with the main information system. The first decision support modules developed include an expert system generator, a neural network simulator, a simplex module and a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) module. Examples of applications developed using this toolbox are described, and a development methodology is suggested.

Decision support for supply chain planning under uncertainty

In order to support decision making, this article investigates the planning process of a production unit within a supply chain. The aim is to satisfy the customer demand while respecting the internal constraints of the production unit and those of its supply chain partners. In that purpose, we suggest a mixed-integer linear programming model which is embedded in a dynamic procedure simulating a rolling horizon planning process. A special attention is given to the temporal features of the production unit and of its suppliers (cycle times, anticipation delays) as well as those of the planning process itself (planning horizon, frozen horizons, planning periodicity). Moreover, the proposed framework takes into account flexible demands and to evaluate different planning strategies to face with these flexible demands. Finally, a numerical example highlighting the interest of our approach is given.