Abstract
Production planning has a great importance for competitive position of a manufacturing firm in today’s competitive environment where customer’s demand changing continuously. Production plans are based on presumptions and expectations for a number of factors such as capacity, machine utilisation, inventory and manufacturing lead time. They require decisions or assumptions to be made with respect to these factors. Changes in one or more of these factors affect production plans in both the short and long term. On the other hand, reliable and determinable manufacturing lead times are essential inputs for all production planning systems, particularly in the make-to-order industry. Workload control has been described as one of the new production planning and control concepts for capacity planning and manufacturing lead time management. This approach has the potential to make an important contribution in the competitiveness of companies. This paper aims to investigate the contribution of Workload Control to production planning in job shops. For this purpose, two control mechanisms within the Workload Control concept are considered: (i) input control regulating the work that can enter the shop, and (ii) output control using capacity adjustments to regulate the outflow of work. The effects of these mechanism on performance of job shop is examined by using an approximate model for queueing networks with blocking.
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