Integrated planning and scheduling in the engineer-to-order sector

Abstract

The key focus in the 1990s for manufacturers of capital equipment and high-value goods has been to optimize the ir re sponsive ne ss to customer re qu ire ments without compromising the performance of their products. Important elements which underpin such agility must be the information links to the customer and the interfaces to key suppliers. The extended lead-time for engineer-to-order (ETO) products typically requires a review of the whole order fulfilment process and the software systems that support this to improve re sp on sive ne ss. Re se arc h shows th at a ke y fac to r for manufacturing responsiveness is the performance of the firm' s manufacturing control function. Whilst there is a wide range of ge ne ric p ro prietary software available that me e ts a company' s planning and schedu ling re qu ireme nts with varying degrees of success, the main difficulty lies in understanding the match between the business needs and the capabilities of the software. This is a particular problem for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) which are common in the ETO sector. The EPSRC-funded work covered by this paper is aimed at developing novel planning and scheduling reference models for industrial sectors where the MRPII paradigm is not a good fit. The work is based upon detailed case studies within 13 industrial companies. This paper presents the research aims and objectives, gives an overview of the ETO sector, ex plains the data capture method used for the case study companies, and the use of extended event process chains and planning and scheduling process models which underpin the development of the reference models, and finally, presents and discusses the reference model for the ETO sector.

An optimisation approach for capacity planning: modelling insights and empirical findings from a tactical perspective

“…The production processes are typically non-repetitive yet labour intensive, often demanding highly skilled labour . In this context, customers change their requirements over the time of product fabrication and, thus, the ability to respond to these modifications is a prerequisite of success (Little et al, 2000;Cameron & Braiden, 2004;Zorzini et al, 2008;Montreuil et al, 2013) and the main order winning characteristic in this context is fitness for purpose (Little et al, 2000). Hicks & Braiden (2000), Cameron & Braiden (2004), Grabenstetter & Usher (2014) and Willner et al (2014) also highlighted that price, reduced lead times and delivery performance are important aspects of customer service as most contracts include financial penalties for late delivery.…”

A Concept for Project Manufacturing Planning and Control for Engineer-to-Order Companies

“…This dynamic market situation asks for a lot of flexibility to cope with these fluctuations. Gosling and Naim [3] and Little [11] describe that flexibility is a condition for ETO firm success, an ETO company needs to deal with strong fluctuations in mix and sales volume. The second characteristics uncertainty is the difference between the amount of information required to perform a task and the amount of information already available in the organization.…”

“…And in an ETO environment uncertainty is high for both the process as for the products for example in terms of specification, demand, lead times and the duration of processes [5] The third characteristic mentioned by Bertrand and Muntslag [2] is complexity and it exists because information is unknown and changes are bound to occur over time. Little [11] states that a common feature of ETO manufacturing is for the customers to change their requirements over the time of the production.…”

Sequencing jobs in an engineer-to-order engineering environment

“…In addition, the goods manufactured using ETO models tend to be complex in nature, resulting in deep and complicated multilevel product structures and routings which often contain job-specific and engineered-to-order components (Hicks & Braiden, 2000;Hicks, Song, & Earl, 2007). In the ETO environment, the engineering process is the largest controllable consumer of lead time taking up to one half of the total lead time (Little, Rollins, Peck, & Porter, 2000;Pandit & Zhu, 2009). Since ETO firms produce products which are often used in large projects, it is not unusual for their customers to impose large cost penalties for lateness.…”

“…The scheduling process is typically conducted on a weekly basis for several reasons. First, Pandit and Zhu (2009) and Little et al (2000) point out that the ETO engineering process can consume up to one-half of the production lead time. Hence, the engineering task is considered to be a long duration process.…”