This is a tough question and if someone can provide a commonsense answer then they must know what they are talking about. Well here we go! To be relevant the calculation for an optimum order quantity should take account of 100 years of industrial engineering and operations research. So ….. below we review the 4 … Read more
Production variability and demand variability causes congestion in supply chains. One way to reduce this congestion is to reduce the variability by addressing its causes. Another and more subtle, way to deal with congestion effects is by combining multiple sources of variability. This is known as variability pooling, and has a number of manufacturing and … Read more
Capacity decisions made at the time of asset procurement have a huge strategic effect on the long term competitiveness of a manufacturing operation. This is particularly true in the process industry where most of the factories use Flow Lines.
In this article we explain how flow lines are designed as well as the supply chain system benefits of un-balancing flow lines, i.e. adding extra capacity upstream and downstream of a flow line’s bottleneck.
There is a view that all buffers are waste, particularly from some Lean practitioners. “If you see inventory waiting anywhere in a supply chain then it should be reduced to zero”. However, businesses should be Lean not Anorexic and buffers can be used to increase the flow of product and profit.