New concepts for production planning and control

Production planning and control (PPC) is of great importance for the competitive position of manufacturing firms. For over thirty years a large number of computer assisted PPC systems have been on offer, most of them based on the well-known MRP logic. Since these systems often lead to unsatisfactory results, a number of new concepts for PPC systems have been developed. In this paper the authors first describe the traditional PPC concept and its critique, then they review the new PPC concepts which are available for practical application (workload control, MRP II, OPT, JIT-Kanban, progressive figures) together with Operational Research OR models which are relevant to these new concepts.