Manufacturing Planning and Control

Production organisations are now manufacturing a wide variety of products with increasingly shorter life cycles. Managing such organisations is a complicated task. A primary reason for the complexity is the lack of clarity as to how modifications of the components of the production organization affect the performance of the organisation as a whole. What ultimately matters is the `bottom line' efficiency and flexibility of the overall production organisation. This book focuses on how changes to the production components affect the organisation as a whole. Solutions are outlined based on concepts from Information Science and Systems Theory; knowledge of manufacturing as an application domain; and experience with the design of computerised factory control systems. More specifically, it describes the development of a reference model, which represents an idealised production organisation, defining the global tasks of its components as well as the relations between the components and the whole. A systems view of a production organisation is given, encompassing all aspects of production and management.