Validation of an automated capacity planning in the concrete building materials industry using an industrial case study

Abstract

Production planning, in general, is the allocation of resources to jobs in a manner that should satisfy criteria of minimizing cost and satisfying customers. It is a complicated process and demands well defined techniques, time and experience to achieve satisfactory results. The work reported in this paper concerns the development of the second stage of a research project that has been undertaken to develop, validate and implement an automated capacity planning system in the concrete building materials industry. The first stage of the project was aimed at developing the specifications of the automated model and the software and has been published previously. The objective of this paper is to validate the model through running an industrial case study and comparing the output of the model with that of a human scheduler. The model has also been tested by introducing a realistic band of fluctuation to the monthly and annual demand forecast. This was designed to show whether the strategies applied in the model could cope with the variation in sales demand. The results of the study show that the model is a practical and significant managerial tool for exploring and testing options open to production managers.