Abstract
With the continuous development of technology, traditional manual work has been becoming more and more automated. Most large or medium-sized companies have applied Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software into their business and production activities. However, since many small firms cannot afford ERP because of its expensive cost, they often still employ manual work for the same tasks this software resolves, especially for scheduling. This paper aims to provide a possible solution for small businesses to try automated scheduling and discover whether it can help much. There are two main ways to make this determination: a mathematical model and a heuristic model, which are suitable for assessing low- and medium-sized workloads, respectively. This case study was carried out in a small domestic interior furniture company, particularly in scheduling for their customized products in two-stage flow shop. Normally, they produce according to the sequence of customers’ orders. However, when we applied these supportive tools with batch-processing machines, they experienced enhanced production performance due to diminishing setup time for distinctive items and a more streamlined arrangement of job sequences. These changes were implemented for some small companies that do not use many production stages and have a suitable number of jobs and customers. If this method were applied to larger demands, it would need further improvement and development to become a complete tool that can perform like a part of an ERP system.
Highlights
Scheduling is a decision-making process, which is extensively used in manufacturing and service industries, that works to allocate resources to jobs in the given time in order to optimize certain goals
The research of this study focuses on the scheduling problem inherent to the BTO manufacturing strategy in a two-stage flow shop with batch-processing machines
Gupta et al [23] attempted to develop a simple heuristic without much satisfaction about the resulting accuracy of the optimal solution; their work provides an initial solution as fast as possible while weighting other methods to solve the flow shop scheduling problems to minimize the makespan
Summary
Scheduling is a decision-making process, which is extensively used in manufacturing and service industries, that works to allocate resources to jobs in the given time in order to optimize certain goals. Salespeople are flexible to limit numerous choices for customers and publish the suggestion in catalogs in order to help schedulers more to combine a variety of styles with a wide range of fabric types to cut down the setup time and the number of different manufacturing stages for the firms. The research of this study focuses on the scheduling problem inherent to the BTO manufacturing strategy in a two-stage flow shop with batch-processing machines. A mixedinteger linear programming method is combined with fuzzy logic to create a fuzzy linear programming model, which can help to minimize the flow time more effectively. The result of this research can be expanded and applied to scheduling problems with similar manufacturing environment and setups
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