Investigation of Effectiveness of Order Review and Release Models in Make to Order Supply Chain

Politecnico di Milano, Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering Department, 20133, Milano, Italy

Abstract

Nowadays customisation becomes more common due to vast requirement from the customers for which industries are trying to use make-to-order (MTO) strategy. Due to high variation in the process, workload control models are extensively used for jobshop companies which usually adapt MTO strategy. Some authors tried to implement workload control models, order review and release systems, in non-repetitive manufacturing companies, where there is a dominant flow in production. Those models are better in shop floor but their performances are never been investigated in high variation situations like MTO supply chain. This paper starts with the introduction of particular issues in MTO companies and a general overview of order review and release systems widely used in the industries. Two order review and release systems, the Limited and Balanced models, particularly suitable for flow shop system are applied to MTO supply chain, where the processing times are difficult to estimate due to high variation. Simulation results show that the Balanced model performs much better than the Limited model if the processing times can be estimated preciously.