Optimization And Implementation Of Production Planning And Schedulingling System In An ETO Company

To gain competitive edge and retain customers, enterprises need to meet customers'diversified requirements at lower cost in the customer-oriented markets. To enhance the competitive strength and lower operation cost further, such companies have employed all kinds of management systems and production systems to address real problems. In the meanwhile, more theoretical methodology and matured methods have been put into practical usage.In this paper, we researched a tooling-making company. Its main business includes designing and manufacturing tooling products. This company has many painpoints in sections such as production designing, sales, and performance evaluation. And, its ERP system has a poor efficiency. This system cannot finish the following functions which include choosing the right raw materials, selecting the operation machines automatically and reasonably, and making a detailed planning and scheduling plan, coping with the outburst orders. Besides these, order tardiness often occurs, and sales persons incline to make a commit they cannot meet.Many researchers and IT companies have done much theoretical and application research on how to optimize the whole supply chain, and shorten the order fulfillment cycle. According to the real situation, we try to address the problem efficiently and effectively. And we provide a reasonable proposal and make it into a system, in which we balance the cost and effectiveness. In this paper, we address the main four parts: model design and algorithm research, business process design and reengineer, system analysis, design and implementation. Actually, we have taken the usage of Advance Planning and Scheduling theory during the whole process of this planning system design and development. All our work is to address problems such as scheduling and daily operation painpoints in their company.At first, we did a lot of field research, and then introduced the research progress in the production planning area. One of our research topics is flexible flow shop problems. It is NP-hard mathematically and cannot obtain optimal solution in polynomial-time. We summarized and deducted the real problem, and make a well-designed model, and then employed the heuristics approach to address it. Our heuristics way is based on the Apparent Tardiness Cost rule which was introduced by former researchers, and we made some changes and improvement to adjust it to meet our requirement. Then, we programed it and tested the real output when we debuged the system in the job shop.In the meanwhile, we sampled lots of first-hand data to deduce the speed formula of every machine. And we carefully analyzed the whole operation process and made some necessary and reasonable change. Besides these work, we introduceed the details we took into consideration when designing and implementing the production system.Finally, we designed the production system, it includes the following function models: order scheduling, order maintain, system maintain, and status searching, and report analysis. We coded the system within 2 months, and then put it into usage. With our debug and test, we can say that our research could successfully address the company's problems. The viewpoints and context we recommend in the paper will be helpful for the future research and application in manufacturing industry.