Drum-buffer-rope and buffer management: Impact on production management study and practices

The drum-buffer-rope/buffer management approach radically changes the content of production management practice, research and pedagogy. This paper documents the major impacts that drum-buffer-rope has on production management study and practice. In summary it provides a framework which distils the complexities of material flow into an understandable format; reduces drastically the number of resources that must be explicitly scheduled; warms of potential disruption to the production plan; controls lead time; guides continuous improvement efforts; offers a significantly improved alternative to the kanban production system; aligns local resource performance measures with global organizational performance; and makes traditional job shop capacity management techniques obsolete.