Course Summary Organization: A process providing goods and services based on a set of inputs, including raw material, capital, labor and knowledge. The scope of the organizational operations is defined by its mission and it is supported by a corporate strategy that seeks to provide competitive advantage based on the concepts of cost leadership, product differentiation and responsiveness. The competitive advantage sought by an organization is dynamically changing due internal and external developments, and it is strongly dependent on the life cycle of the relevant products and industries. From an operational standpoint, the aforementioned competitive advantage is based on a set of critical success factors that are enabled through the deployed processes and the adopted operational policies.

Course Summary Product and Process Selection Focus on the core competencies of the organization Build synergy among the provided products and services The role of concurrent engineering, (design for) manufacturability, modularity, postponement, and “green” manufacturing The role of globalization, mass customization and design for postponement The advantages (and pitfalls) of outsourcing Fabrication and assembly in discrete-part manufacturing Process strategies: Product-based vs. Process-based design and Cellular manufacturing Systematic approaches to alternative evaluation and selection House of Quality: Matriculation of the requirements and the supporting features Break-even points Decision trees for systematically modelling and assessing the impact of uncertainty

Course Summary Equipment Selection and Capacity Planning The significance of product and volume flexibility Process capability The importance of set-up times Nominal vs. effective capacity and plant efficiency Time-phased capacity deployment and net present value analysis A mathematical programming formulation for combined equipment selection and capacity planning Selecting an equipment “mix” that will meet the production requirements while minimizing the deployment and operational costs

Course Summary Facility design Systematic Layout Planning for Process-based layouts Facilitate material flow Minimize travel distances Satisfy adjacency requirements Assembly Line Balancing for Synchronous Transfer Lines Allocate a set of tasks to a number of workstations in a way that Maximizes resource utilization while it observes Precedence constraints and Throughput requirements Heuristical solution: Ranked Positional Weights Cell Formation Defining clusters based on some similarity measure The role of queueing theory and simulation in performance evaluation and design of manufacturing systems Modelling and analyzing the impact of the process variability

Course Summary Warehouse Design, Basic Inventory Control Theory and JIT Warehousing Operations Storage Policies: Randomized, Dedicated and Class-Bassed Design of the fast-pick area Cross-docking Basic Inventory / Replenishment Theory The fundamental trade-off of holding vs. ordering cost Economic Order Quantity The impact of quantity discounts Accommodating randomness through safety stocks Continuous vs. Periodic review policies and ABC analysis Just-In-Time Its motivation Its enablers Its impact: “Push vs. Pull” and KANBAN systems

Course Summary Production Planning and Scheduling Aggregate Planning: Plan for capacity over an horizon of 12 to 18 months Aggregate demand synthesis Basic strategies for accommodating the demand variability and the associated cost structure Tabular and LP-based approaches Master Production Scheduling: Develop detailed production schedules for the various SKU’s for the next 3-6 months Material Requirement Planning: Provide for the components and subassemblies required to support the MPS (Uncapacitated) Dynamic Lot Sizing Shop-floor control: Sequence the various lots competing for the capacity of the various equipment units so that the production schedules generated by the MRP explosion are observed.