Improving the path to align sales, production planning and engineering in high-variety versatile environment

Versatile manufacturing companies typically manufacture high variety, mainly customized products in relatively low volumes, competing for each order with other supplier companies on the basis of price, technical expertise, delivery time and punctuality. In this environment, the combination of high variety and frequent product changes/modifications entangles planning, designing, purchasing and manufacturing activities, thus exacerbating the conciliation of the contrasting goals of Sales, Production Planning and Engineering. This paper aims to explain how planning bills – traditionally adopted to coordinate Sales and Production Planning – can be used to improve alignment among these functional areas in a versatile manufacturing context. In particular, a path is proposed to align not only Sales and Production Planning requests, but also those of the Engineering function. Interestingly enough, such an approach is particularly suited to cope with the frequent product changes characterizing a high-variety versatile environment, and makes it possible to achieve greater advantages than those conventionally attributed to the planning bills.