Jc Johan Wortmann

Future manufacturing systems—towards the extended enterprise

Abstract Manufacturing research has been focused on point solutions and technology-driven solutions. These have not delivered the step changes in performance needed, nor have they been adopted by wide sections of industry so the total business benefit resulting has been modest. The authors propose that manufacturing research must now place greater emphasis on total manufacturing business systems development. Coupled with the integration and communication technologies now becoming available this is the best way to enable manufacturers to realise the competitive gain demanded by the market place. The primary pressures to which manufacturing will be subject are detailed. These are encapsulated in the concept of customer-driven manufacturing business systems. In these systems the customer increasingly becomes an integrated part of both the business systems and the engineering systems of the enterprise. Key product and process technological advances, environmental, and market place developments are described. Probably most significant are the changes in the value chain now emerging which transform manufacturing business systems and overturn both conventional manufacturing strategy and existing manufacturing metrics. The institutionalisation of the Extended Enterprise is one of the most tangible and has far reaching outcomes. This will involve major structural changes in business organisation. The basis of partnership within the Extended Enterprise is not yet well understood but alternative operations models are likely to be industry and market sector specific. Concurrent Engineering is becoming accepted but understanding of best practice on how, when and in what order to implement it is needed. The extension of tools to embrace environmental issues could offer significant benefit to small and medium sized enterprises. The appraisal of manufacturing business options must be developed to match the changes in the business operations environment described above.

Generic bill-of-material: a new product model

The supply of industrial products to the market has increased fast in the last decade. In particular, the number of product variants increases very fast. Therefore, the recording of product data and product-structure becomes a problem for the existing production/inventory control information systems. In this paper a solution for this problem is given in the form of the generic bill-of-material. With this generic bill-of-material, the bill-of-material structure for all variants of a product family is specified only once. This makes this bill-of-material structure highly transparent, and it enables the avoidance of redundancy.

Architectures in context: on the evolution of business, application software, and ICT platform architectures

This paper distinguishes between the business domain, the application software domain, and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform domain. It analyses historical developments in each of these three domains and shows that they experienced parallel development. The parallelism can be explained by mutual influence and alignment. Innovation in one domain may enable or drive developments in another. In order to be able to analyse alignment patterns, the notions of business architecture, application software architecture, and ICT platform architecture are introduced and defined. Interdependent historical developments sometimes demonstrate a radical change. Each can be described as a shift in dominant design, and we identify six such changes in the history of the modern enterprise. Professionals and scientific researchers working in Information and Management can benefit from these insights by assuming that radical changes in dominant designs will affect their field in the future according to the same pattern.

Production management systems for one-of-a-kind products

Abstract The term “one-of-a-kind production” covers a diversity of industries. Therefore, this paper presents first of all a typology of one-of-a-kind production systems. The typology is based on two questions: Which part of the supply chain is customer-order driven? What investments in resources, products or processes have been made independently of customer orders? Next, the paper investigates key areas of management attention for several types in the typology with a focus on production management problems. These production management problems are related to information systems requirements for different types. Finally, these different types of information systems are analyzed. It is concluded that: (i) information on customer-order specific products should be distinguished sharply from information on anonymous products; (ii) information systems in the customer-order driven part of the supply chain should first of all support the creation of customer-order specific information by qualified engineers; and (iii) large investments made in products or processes should be reflected in the information system by automatic generation of customer-order specific information.

A review of capicity planning techniques within standard software packages

This paper gives a review of capacity planning techniques from which todays standard software packages for production control make their choice. The following techniques are discussed in the paper: four variants of the rough cut capacity check, capacity requirements planning with infinite and finite loading, input/output planning without and with individual work orders, and a number of sequencing techniques. An important issue throughout the paper is the concept of robustness and nervousness of planning techniques, Aspects of interaction between techniques and human planners arc given. The human planner is still an important factor in capacity planning.

Generative bill of material processing systems

Abstract Many manufacturing companies have, over the past several years, been forced to drastically increase their product assortment. Many of them have found that traditional bill of material (BOM) processing systems do not sufficiently support the maintenance of very large amounts of product (structure) data. This maintenance problem is implied by the requirements to identify each product variant explicitly by a part number for which product data including BOM data must be defined explicitly. With the introduction of MRP oriented production control systems a great deal of literature has been devoted to structuring the BOMs to support the master production scheduling function. In particular the concept of modularization BOMs is a well known research issue. In this paper the assumptions underlying the successful modularization of BOMs are made explicit. It will be shown that in practice, seldom can all assumptions be true. Therefore, new concepts for representing BOMs of large numbers of product variants ...

Towards one-of-a-kind production : the future of European industry

This paper conjectures that European industry will move more and more towards one-of-a-kind production in the future. The nature of future one-of-a-kind production is indicated: it is characterized by customer-order driven engineering and manufacturing, while re-using past experience and existing products and processes.

New developments in generative BOM processing systems

Abstract The principle of generative bill-of-material (BOM) processing systems is that different BOMs belonging to different product variants can be represented by a single, so-called source BOM. The BOM processing systems comprise additional data structures which hold information on the relationships between product characteristics of parent product variants and component product variants, and on the relationships between characteristics of a parent product variant and its BOM data. These relationships allow the automatic generation of the individual BOM of each represented product variant. There are several alternative ways of implementing a generative BOM processing system. The oldest concept known is the variant BOM concept. This concept provides a relatively simple solution to deal with large varieties of final product variants. However the concept has a number of drawbacks such as the representation of product variety at lower levels in the product structure and data redundancy which hampers data ma...

Collaborative systems for production management

Supply chain management means the coordination of all material and information flows throughout the entire value chain. The main goal is to organise the overall process of the supply chain to achieve an optimum in costs and time, for example, by improving the following four Figures, such as increasing capacity utilization, decreasing inventories, decreasing lead time and increasing delivery reliability and adherence to delivery dates. The conventional control of supply chains pursuit top-down planning approaches to coordinate the supply flows (incl. material and infom1ation), run by current ERP systems, between the different enterprises participating in a supply network. Collaborative supply net management has technological and non-technological aspects. From the non-teclmological point, aside from willingness to organisational changes, a feeling of tmstful partnership must evolve. On the technological side, agent technology is proposed as being indispensable to achieve integration of Advanced Planning Systems (APS) across company borders. Thus, this paper proposes an agent-based approach to collaborative supply net management, based on the SCOR-Model (Supply chain Operations Reference-mode!). Finally an example is given that sketches the idea of an agent-based simulation approach to tackle the bullwhip effect

Decomposition of information systems for production management

Abstract This paper approaches the issue of decentralization and decomposition of information systems from two angles, viz. from an organizational and from an infological point of view. Current information systems tend to become more and more integrated. However, this integration causes organizational complexity, which, in turn, becomes prohibitive for organizational change. Thus, there is a need for decomposition of the information system from an organizational point of view. A strategy for such a decomposition in a production environment is given.