PRODUCTION SCHEDULING ON PARALLEL MACHINES - A CASE-STUDY

This case study reports the development and implementation process of a production planning system for a carbon products manufacturer, The m odel developed for the company provides an optimal production sequence by minimizing the setup costs. Initially, the optimal sequence obtain ed faced hurdles at the implementation stage due to : (i) lack of inte gration of information systems among different corporate units, and (i i) the insensitivity of the traditional productivity measurement stand ards which do not account for the costs of quality but over-emphasize the capacity utilization instead. Such hurdles were overcome by addres sing performance measurement issues and information systems integratio n. The integration of information in a timely fashion turned out to be a major factor in successfully implementing the system. (C) 1998 Else vier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.