Operations simulation of on-demand digital print

On-demand digital print service is a form of personalized manufacturing service. Key to the commercial print value-creation chain is the responsive and accurate knowledge discovery and decision making throughout the service engagement and fulfillment between the content suppliers and the print service providers (PSP). The business model of on-demand print imposes a great challenge to the PSP factory design, production planning and management due to its intrinsic, highly volatile demand stream. It pushes the PSP resource planning and production management from a form of “tribal art” towards data driven management science. Operations simulation and its practice is an integral component of the data-driven decision making process, and is gaining growing significance. In this paper, we describe operations simulation of an end-to-end digital print process; we treat the management of print manufacturing as a heterogeneous, concurrent, integrated system, accounting for the performance, efficiency, stability, and sustainability as organic system attributes. We exhibit the comparison between the simulation results and the factory internal audit information and show good agreement.