Production Planning & Control 

About: Production Planning & Control is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Supply chain & Supply chain management. It has an ISSN identifier of 0953-7287. Over the lifetime, 2577 publications have been published receiving 77214 citations. The journal is also known as: Production planning and control.

Sustainable manufacturing: trends and research challenges

Abstract: Sustainability is and will be a crucial issue for the present and future generations. The current assumption that natural resources are infinite and that the regenerative capacity of the environment is able to compensate for all human action is no longer acceptable. Hence, sustainability issues will influence all organisational aspects of the human life, from the economical, political, social and environmental points of view. The reason is simple: until now, all human activities have been based on the paradigm of unlimited resources and unlimited world's capacity for regeneration; from now on, the awareness of the termination of this assumption means that all related behavioural models must be changed. This is a very impressive objective embracing all fields of culture, economy, technology and much more. A continuing effort, together with a reasonable time span, will be required to pursue this goal. Fortunately, nature and the environment are capable of self-regulation and will give man a chance to recove...

A digital supply chain twin for managing the disruption risks and resilience in the era of Industry 4.0

Abstract: We theorize a notion of a digital supply chain (SC) twin – a computerized model that represents network states for any given moment in real time. We explore the conditions surrounding the design an...

Collaborative networked organisations and customer communities: value co-creation and co-innovation in the networking era

Abstract: Strategic networks such as collaborative networked organisations (CNOs) and virtual customer communities (VCCs) show a high potential as drivers of value co-creation and co-innovation. Both look at the network structures as a source of jointly value creation and open innovation through access to new skills, knowledge, markets and technologies by sharing risk and integrating complementary competencies. This collaborative endeavour is able to enhance the adaptability and flexibility of CNOs and VCCs value creating systems in order to react in response to external drivers such as collaborative (business) opportunities. Strategic business networks are active entities continuously adapting to their environment in order to enhance their capabilities to respond to short-term business opportunities, and therefore allow their business ecosystems to follow the rhythm of industry dynamics, and customers’ changing needs and preferences. Value co-creation is the new trend in open-business models trying to integrate or...

Implementing the Lean Sigma framework in an Indian SME: a case study

Abstract: Lean and Six Sigma are two widely acknowledged business process improvement strategies available to organisations today for achieving dramatic results in cost, quality and time by focusing on process performance. Lately, Lean and Six Sigma practitioners are integrating the two strategies into a more powerful and effective hybrid, addressing many of the weaknesses and retaining most of the strengths of each strategy. Lean Sigma combines the variability reduction tools and techniques from Six Sigma with the waste and non-value added elimination tools and techniques from Lean Manufacturing, to generate savings to the bottom-line of an organisation. This paper proposes a Lean Sigma framework to reduce the defect occurring in the final product (automobile accessories) manufactured by a die-casting process. The proposed framework integrates Lean tools (current state map, 5S System, and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)) within Six Sigma DMAIC methodology to enhance the bottom-line results and win customer loyalty. Implementation of the proposed framework shows dramatic improvement in the key metrics (defect per unit (DPU), process capability index, mean and standard deviation of casting density, yield, and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)) and a substantial financial savings is generated by the organisation.

A survey of the assembly line balancing procedures

Abstract: The assembly line balancing problem consists of assigning tasks to an ordered sequence of stations such that the precedence relations among the tasks are satisfied and some performance measure is optimized. Due to the complexity of the problem, heuristic procedures appear to be more promising than the optimum-seeking algorithms. For the single-model, deterministic version, there are numerous exact and heuristic algorithms developed, while for the other more complex but more realistic versions, the research published consists mainly of heuristic procedures. In this paper, the heuristic procedures are critically examined and summarized in sufficient detail to provide a state-of-the-art survey. An evaluation of the procedures and some further research topics have also been presented.