Production planning for an artists studio-A case study

The company involved in this case study produces engraved copper cylinders for the manufacture of items such as wallpaper and Christmas wrapping paper. Every cylinder is made to customer specification. There are three main production processes-the production of the copper cylinder, the production of an opaline film of the design and the transfer of the design from this film to the cylinder using an engraving machine. It is the production of the opaline film which is the bottleneck process. This process is carried out by artists and it is difficult to predict the time required to produce each film. Few production planning systems have been devised to meet the needs of such make-to-order companies which need to quote delivery dates for incoming orders and to maintain these promise dates if they are to remain compeititve. In this study a Decision Support System was developed to address these problems. It uses an hierarchical approach with two decision levels-the customer order enquiry stage and the job release stage. At the former stage, workload control is carried out so that realistic delivery dates can be calculated. At the latter stage, the system aims to ensure that all jobs are released to the artists studio so that they can be completed by the promised time.