American manufacturers face increasing competition from abroad. In addition to having low prices, being competitive requires outstanding quality, short lead times, and increased responsiveness to customer's changing demands. Companies that have successfully responded to this changing environment have done so by decreasing work in process (WIP) and finished goods inventory (FGI) levels, thereby allowing early detection of quality problems, shorter lead times, and less vulnerability to changing demands. In some situations, the kanban system has been highly successful at reducing WIP and FGI. However, kanban is applicable only to repetitive manufacturing environments. In previous NSF-funded research, the investigators have developed a more broadly applicable pull production control system, called CONWIP (CONstant Work in Process). This system promises to bring the benefits of kanban to a wider class of manufacturing environments. But a production control system cannot operate in a vacuum; it must be able to interface with the sales, customer service, quality control, product development, and capacity management functions. In recognition of this, the PI's have developed a hierarchical planning system for a pull production control system, called Synchronized Production. A version of this hierarchy has been designed and implemented for the case of a simple manufacturing environment without assembly operations. Although the CONWIP production control mechanism and some of its supporting models can accomodate assembly operations, a consistent hierarchy for manufacturing environments with complex assembly structures has not been developed. This project will extend the Synchronized Production hierarchy to complex manufacturing environments with assembly operations, shared resources, and floating bottlenecks. The ultimate goal is to bring the performance benefits of pull production and the consistency provided by hierarchical planning to a much broader class of manufacturing environments. The initial development of the Synchronized Production concept was jointly funded by NSF and the IBM Corporation. IBM will continue to fund aspects of the research specifically related to their needs (e.g., coding of software for a specific implementation). By combining industry and government support, this project will develop both the theoretical and applied results needed to enable Synchronized Production to play a role in restoring the competitiveness of American manufacturing.
