Fredrik Lind

Creating a model to facilitate the allocation of materials planning resources in engineering change situations

Shortened product development times and more frequent product changes combined with product quality and timeliness of delivery are prerequisites of competitiveness. These have increased the workload and underscored the importance of effectively managing the materials planning process in engineering change situations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a procedure for creating a model to differentiate between items in order to facilitate the allocation of materials planning resources in change situations. It develops a procedure in the framework of the study and verifies it using the case study technique. Furthermore, the case study shows that there are many different engineering change situations that occur in the materials planning process. Many engineering change variables and materials planning variables have a major impact on the material scrap costs and material shortage costs, but only a few generate the different types of engineering change situations for the materials planning process. The case study shows that material scrap costs and material shortage costs decrease after the introduction of a tool to differentiate between items to facilitate the allocation of materials planning resources.