For manufacturing companies growing customer expectations, shortening product life cycles and increasing product variant numbers mean great challenges. Overcoming these is a major task for production planning, which is responsible for coordinating all business processes directly related to manufacturing. This paper presents important activities of production planning giving an integrative overview, and presents the digital factory concept with special attention to problems and their possible solutions. It concludes with challenges still waiting to be resolved and future development trends.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.