Decision support system for planning and scheduling in batch-wise plants

The process industry has to cope with a rigorous competition caused by more short-term dynamics in supply, more unpredictable and turbulent demand patterns, stronger requirements on product variety, delivery lead-time and quality of product. It forces company to spend efforts at improving its competitiveness and productivity. Appropriate strategies or action in the area of production planning and scheduling can contribute to survive in these conditions. The paper describes an effective performance measurement system for supporting planning and scheduling decision making in batch-wise plants contributing to the improvement of company´s competitiveness and productivity. To assess possible improvement options with respect to the selected evaluation parameters a generic system dynamics model of an internal supply chain in a batch-wise company is developed. The model applied to a specific industrial plant in the food sector results in a recommendation to reduce inventory level and to increase effective capacity utilization in the plant.