1. 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.

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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.