Production scheduling validity in high level supply chain models

Although they focus on the big picture, high level supply chain models cannot gloss over the capacity of production nodes to meet production allocations. Capacity is not simply a reflection of equipment production rates. Short runs drive down utilization by increasing total time lost to changeovers. Multistage plants require coordination of capacities at the several production stages. In short, production capacity is crucially affected by the way production runs are scheduled through plants. Modeling actual scheduling practice is often unrealistic, since methods vary from plant to plant, and involve a blend between planned schedules and on-the-fly adjustments. This paper suggests that there is a range of approaches to modeling production scheduling. In the modeling of supply chains, modeling alternatives must be assessed in terms of cost of development and implementation versus validity