Designing an assessment framework for integrated production planning and control

Abstract

The objective in production planning and control is to fulfill customer demand at minimum cost. But, nowadays, market demands for shorter delivery times and improved quality, which have created a need for better integration on the many activities involved in manufacturing (Burbidge, et al. (1987)).

There are many challenges in order to achieve integration, some of them are considering the resources in a finite realistic way instead of an ideal way to avoid making unrealistic plans (Usher and Fernandes (1996)), linking production planning and scheduling to avoid ending up with severely unbalanced resource load, thus creating superfluous bottlenecks (Umnutkittikul(2008)), making the whole workforce work together and with the same goals (Burbidge, et al.(1987), Shobrys and White (2000)) etc.

To improve the integration in an organization, I believe that it is important to know how integrated the organization is and where should it target to go next. So, the purpose of this thesis is to elaborate an assessment framework to evaluate the level of integration of companies.

In order to carry out this project the following methodology will be applied. Firstly, a literature review over theory about PPC integration would be carried out, making an overview over relevant theory about it. Afterwards, I will look for the main functions necessary to integrate PPC and try to find out whether there are some drivers that help integrating them. Finally, the assessment framework will be constructed.

Based on the research work, an assessment framework for PPC integration has been developed. I believe that managers can make use of it to assess the level of integration of their companies, as well as to obtain some guidelines about where should they aim their efforts to increase the integration in their organization.

As far as I am concerned, there is gap in literature about this topic and, hopefully, I will help to start filling that gap or encourage other researchers to give attention to the topic of integration assessing.