Abstract
Supply chain management and integration play a key factor in contemporary manufacturing concept. Companies seek to integrate itself within a cooperative and mutual benefiting supply chain. Supply chain scheduling, as an important aspect of supply chain management, highly emphasizes on minimizing stock costs and delivery costs. Most previous researches on supply chain scheduling problems assume make-to-order production, which includes delivery cost in lot-size. This practice simplifies the complexity of the problem. Instead, this research discusses make-to-contract production, where the supply chain has a rolling planning horizon that changes according to contracts. Within a planning horizon, two types of interval are defined. The first is frozen interval, in which the manufacturing decision cannot be changed. The second is free interval, where schedules can be adjusted depending on new contracts. This research aims to build a robust rolling supply management schedule to satisfy customers’ needs, by considering supplier, production, and delivery lot-size simultaneously. The objective is to effectively decide a combination of supplier, production, and delivery lot-size that minimizes total cost consisting of supplier cost, finish good stock cost, and delivery cost. Based on the concept, this study designs a problem-solving process that combines the methods of rolling planning horizon and genetic algorithm. Delivery size (DS), finish good stock (FS), and early delivery cost (ED) are the three methods applied; each will provide a guideline to produce a feasible solution. By further considering the fluctuations in practical needs and performing an overall evaluation, a robust and optimal supply chain scheduling plan can be decided, including the optimal lot-sizes of supplier, production, and delivery. In the effectiveness test which considers 3 types of customer demands and 11 types of company cost structures, the simulated data test results suggest that the proposed methods in this study have excellent performance.
Highlights
In contemporary manufacturing industries, it is a common practice for firms to operate as a part of a supply chain
This study aims to provide a robust production-sales plan or supply chain schedule that applies to most circumstances, in which producers can update the schedule whenever demands change until the whole schedule planning horizon ends
The early delivery cost (ED) rule is less effective, but with very high PIP of 97.5%. This result suggests that the three dispatching rules we proposed can effectively provide very good initial solutions for the supply chain scheduling problem addressed in this study
Summary
It is a common practice for firms to operate as a part of a supply chain. Supply chain management and production-sales integration are an essential topic for managers. Without appropriate supply chain management and planning, unnecessary costs may occur and result in wasting resources. It is highly possible to lower operating costs of firms while satisfying customer demands with proper supply chain management and supply chain scheduling. The efficiency and profitability of the supply chain members can be greatly improved. The costs one should consider when doing supply chain scheduling come from several sources including material purchase, production, goods inventory, and transportation, which can be minimized through optimal supply chain scheduling
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