Engineering adaptive production control strategies for complex discrete manufacturing - with an illustration from the EMS industry

Shopfloor reality shows that many companies with complex discrete production systems have not yet found a satisfying approach to production control. Even though a large variety of theoretical approaches exists in literature, many companies do not engineer an individual production control strategy (PCS), but stick to sub-optimal standard logic provided by their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software or to simple Kanban systems, what leads to suboptimal operational performance. We illustrate this challenge with a case study from industry and present an ongoing research effort to develop an engineering process to derive, parameterize, and update individual PCS. The process relies on a systems analysis perspective we propose and a simulation framework we developed. Important feedback loops known from Lean Manufacturing are considered. The vast solution space is explored starting from a simple hypothetical production system. Later, complexity drivers are stepwise reintegrated and the found dominant PCS is refined accordingly.