Bottleneck management in discrete batch production

Abstract

Today, production planning and scheduling becomes very important part of production management because companies have to react to dynamic market conditions and rising customers´ requirements for shorter delivery times, lower prices and better quality and services. They can use a lot of sophisticated methods and approaches to make their planning processes more ef- ficient and thus meet growing customers´ requirements. However, using these new approaches is not so easy in all types of production systems. This paper deals with production planning and scheduling in discrete batch production that is just an example of very complicated production system. This type of production process is susceptible to demand fluctuation and facility exceptions and this implies bottleneck shifting. Therefore it is quite difficult to implement methods such as Theory of Constraints (TOC) for production planning improvement in the standard way. One part of this paper is a case study wherecurrent production planning and scheduling in real factory is improved just through the use TOC principles.