In supplying just-in-time customers, one common industry practice is for the vendor to set up a warehouse near the point of demand. The authors assume that the plant is a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) where the changeover times between parts of the same family are negligible, but not between parts of different families. Thus the FMS must be configured to produce one family of parts at a time. For each part type, the authors assume that the vendor makes deliveries to the warehouse at fixed intervals. They examined two related issues: the run length for each part family and the number of deliveries to the warehouse in each cycle. The authors first showed that it is not necessary for the vendor to produce for each delivery, nor is it desirable to complete the entire production lot before delivery. They then investigated the FMS loading problem for two or more part-families. The authors developed the expressions for the optimal run length and delivery frequency, (1) when loading the part types sequentially and (2) when loading the part types simultaneously. The resulting models can be shown to be consistent with the classical EOQ model.
