A component-based approach to support order planning in a distributed manufacturing enterprise

Traditional Production Planning and Control systems do not successfully dea l with new organisational forms of manufacturing, like production "islands" , product oriented or customer driven production. These current trends lead in practice to a strong decentralisation of production management tasks an d to an "object oriented structuring" of the manufacturing process. Plannin g and operation in this global environment requires new skills and new appr oaches, namely, the co-ordination of global networks of manufacturing units and of large complex supply chains. In this paper, we present a decentrali sed information system designed to address the tasks of production planning that result from sales orders, originated in customers located anywhere in the world, and accomplished through a distributed manufacturing network. T he system addresses the requirements of a make-to-order environment and is hopefully able to produce realistic satisfactory delivery dates. The inform ation infrastructure designed and implemented using distributed object-orie nted technology with a component based architecture has proven to be effici ent and powerful, satisfying all the major tight requirements of informatio n systems in an environment of distributed manufacturing. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.