Manufacturing Scheduling Performance – a Case Study

Abstract

Scheduling as a research area is motivated by questions that arise in production planning and, generally, in all situations in which scarce resources have to be allocated to activities over time. One of the major reasons, why scheduling receives so much attention, is that information technology enables the shifting of a production strategy from push system to pull system. The purpose of implementing a pull system is to manufacture products based on actual demand and not on forecasts. This paper compares three approaches for manufacturing scheduling, starting with traditional push approach (MRP) and continuing with Kanban (pull) and with Theory of Constraints -TOC (pull/push), regarding performance and throughput improvement. Kanban as well as TOC showed a stable and lower number of active tasks and shorter task completion time compared to traditional production scheduling, but on the account of lower resource efficiency.