Widespread concern about global competition in manufacturing has led to an increasing need for better, more detailed coordination to improve the performance of manufacturing operations. The research will examine these issues in three different ways. First, the research will expand upon a line of research that addresses coordination among the various stages of production within a single manufacturing facility. Research in this area will focus on the planning and control of systems whose elements have become more tightly coupled because of inventory reductions resulting from the adoption of just-in-time policies. These inventory reductions have created significant challenges to meeting production goals and deadlines, especially in fabrication-assembly systems. In such systems, many parts must be produced or procured in a carefully orchestrated manner to ensure that the parts can be mated in the correct proportions, so that production goals are met. Second, the research will investigate coordination issues among distinct manufacturing facilities building on recent work on establishing supplier delivery schedules and related transportation contracts. A key factor is how each customer's ordering pattern affects the costs of production at the supplier, and how to define ordering policies (at the customers), and, where applicable, order acceptance or delivery date setting policies (at the suppliers) which are mutually beneficial to all parties. Third, the research will concentrate on coordination issues at the interface between manufacturing functions which traditionally have been dealt with separately, both in industry and in the academic literature. Although some of the past research lies in these interfaces (e.g., the interface between production scheduling and transportation logistics, the interface between quality control and production control), the research will focus on the interfaces between operational and tactical control topics and those dealing with capital investment decisions. It is not well understood how operational policies affect the realized capacity of existing manufacturing systems, nor how they should influence choices for new systems. Similarly, it is not well understood how the physical characteristics of existing or proposed manufacturing systems affect the development of good, simple, operational controls. Analytical models will be developed, some descriptive and others optimization-based. The models will consider different levels of information availability (relative to both speed and detail) and practical performance evaluation methods. This also will allow assessment of the value of better information systems and well-designed incentive policies where coordination is important in achieving improved manufacturing performance.
