Proposal for a joint production planning in network organizations.
Miller, Antonin, Kudrna, Jiri, Simon, Michal
Abstract: The actual world-market situation forms permanent
competitive pressure for manufacturing bussiness companies. One of the
ways of advancing competetive abilities is cooperating and associating
to network organizations. Within these organizations may also cooperate
in manufacturing process, where the cooperation brings advantages of
enlarging their production base. The content of this supply is
description of cooperation, mainly the planning and management of this
complex system. Transition to this form is not in fact easy. This paper
then may serve as a basic help at the joint planning and management of
production. Starting points are withdrawn to the evaluation of
manufacturing processes, providing logistics between businesses and
identify processes for joint planning. Key words: process, cooperation,
planning, production management, logistics
1. INTRODUCTION
Currently, by the time a customer is getting stronger an stronger
in comparison with the market, it is important that industrial
enterprises subordinate to market requirements. The market requires a
large diversity of products, quick delivery time, low prices, frequent
innovation, all at once with retaining high quality of products. While
the market is usually dominated by big companies, it is necessary for
smaller companies to cooperate and thus compensate for their
disadvantages to enable themselves to compete in this environment. For
this reason various types of network organizations (eg. clusters) arise.
Within this cooperation it is efficient to work on the production
process of their products closely together and profit from this
cooperation. This production is so interdependent and complex that it
leads to higher demands on coordination of all parts of the production.
For this reason, the demands on the planning and management of this
networked manufacturing system increase. If we want to create a suitable
procedure for joint planning, we firstly have to understand the ways of
planning in individual companies.
2. CURRENT APPROACH TO PLANNING
Planning itself makes an assessment of the future state of business
and also ways to achieve it. The basic factors of influence are the
product and market. The product means number of different manufactured
products and the type of production (routine, serial, etc.). The market
meanshow good we know our customers, whether we produce for a known
customer or the anonymous market (Gregor et al., 2005).
The most common way of dividing the business plan is based on the
hierarchical structure of the company. There are different levels of
organizational structure in different companies, and also there are
different levels of planning in different companies.
Therefore, the planning itself can be divided according to time
perspective (Fig. 1):
* Long-term planning
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
3. PLANNING IN BUSINESS NETWORKS
If we consider the interconnection of production systems within a
network organization, we must count with the fact that such linked
production systems are gaining in complexity, and it still leads to
higher requirements for coordinating all activities related to
production. For this reason, the demands on the planning and management
of this networked manufacturing system increase. So if we talk about a
joint practice in production we should also consider joint planning and
close cooperation in production management.
In the draft plan of working together as a network within the
organization it is important to evaluate all production processes (work)
in business process maps with regard to planning and to find a place to
analyze the possibilities of interconnection and inter-company
logistics.
3.1 Evaluation of manufacturing processes
One of the first steps is to analyze the production process, aiming
to find an individually comparable process and identify appropriate
criteria for their evaluation. Evaluation of manufacturing processes
works on the basis of standard methods of assessment (Stevenson, 2009).
These processes assess and propose the most appropriate procedure for
the product through these processes. The main criteria for the further
work are primarily:
* Quality of process
* Time-consumption of process
* Economic evaluation of the process--the costs
* Usability of resources (capacity--equipment, manpower, materials,
offices, etc.)
After evaluation of these processes (eg milling, turning...) we
look for the best routes of the products through the manufacturing
system (Fig. 2). Passage through these processes must be planned to take
into account the already mentioned criteria, eg process quality, process
costs, capacity, process--based on the current production needs and more
An example might be (Fig. 2) the situation when product 1 and 2a passes
through the best evaluated process 2, which was the capacity overload.
Then you can change the flow of product 2a through the designated
product 2b. It is therefore clear that there is a need to balance the
possibility of some processes (eg. capacity) gains and losses of linking
manufacturing systems.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
The example outlines the procedure for short-term planning and
production management, but it should work in other levels of planning,
both medium-and long-term. An example might be a common approach in
technology development and reconstruction, long-term plans for
production expansion into new markets, namely the search for new
customers or developing of new products. If this area was ignored, a
situation would arise in such situation, where companies buy the same
technologies and will not be able to well utilize production processes.
3.2 Process identification for common produce planning
The next step in the accession to the joint planning and management
processes is the analysis of individual companies in the network
organization (Grasseova, 2008). It is important to focus on processes
directly and indirectly related to the planning and production control
in this analysis. Through these processes should process maps of
individual companies connect themselves. To differ these connections
three levels (degrees) of cooperation were chosen:
* Communication
* Cooperation
* Fusion
The communication is realized only if strictly necessary for the
forwarding of information between enterprises for the effective
functioning of these companies. This information should be forwarded
automatically. At this stage interconnection is considered such as a
link between businesses when the request is send (for example, they want
to produce a certain number of units of particular type) and a partner
in the network processes accepts request and sends back information
about the possibility of receiving the request for production. The
examples of corporate link-level communications are processing orders,
during production, etc.
In cooperation sharing any information takes place within these
linking processes. Companies collected the material from the information
for themselves without any need of asking for any request or initiating
any action. Examples are the production base development plans. The
companies cooperate in the development, to avoid duplicate purchases of
technology.
The last link is considered the complete fusion process, where it
is not clear to us that the process belongs to and serves all the
companies together. Of course sharing of all information is necessary
for the process to function properly. The idea is to deliver the highest
degree of interconnectedness--fusion, so companies need to have the
process as a shared process and jointly participate in its creation,
maintenance and development. As an example here may serve the process of
"inter-enterprise distribution." Companies can have only one
intercompany distribution and it is up to them to agree about the
responsibility and management of this process.
Connection is then made by these levels of connection,
transformation and rationalization of process maps and process so that
it could be link production system and especially in this case the
effective planning and management.
3.3 Inter-company logistics and production planning
The last important stage of preparing the joint production planning
is to provide services between businesses. We should not only monitor
the capacity utilization facilities, time-consuming processes and
delivery dates, but also the actual flow of material between different
production systems. The interconnection system is more productive in the
organization where the importance of logistics network still increases,
because this is the overcoming of larger distances and thus higher costs
for transportation. This should be noticed already when planning. At
this stage of production it is necessary to work with transportation
capacity so that the use of these capacities was as optimal as possible.
And so the shipments of material flow between production systems along
with the quantity and size of production batches could be proposed on
the basis of information on the possibilities (Wannenwetsch, 2010).
4. CONCLUSION
The content of this paper is part of the whole issue of partial
joint coordination in the planning production systems connected with a
network organization. This phase was followed by specific selection of
points (processes) the connection process maps and establishing the
methodology of planning and production control. The potential benefits
are evident now, the cooperation can be better utilized production
capacity, improve product quality, expand the technological base - thus
offering a broader product portfolio, better capacity utilization and
reduce delivery time of production itself, etc. If companies use this
potential in this way, they may increase their competitiveness in
today's global marketplace.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was created with the subsidy of the project 402/08/H051
trader the Grant Academy of the Czech Republic. The name of this project
is "Optimization of multidisciplinary design and modelling of
virtual firm's production systems.
6. REFERENCES
Grasseova, M. (2008). Procesni rizeni, Computer Press, ISBN 978-80-251-1987-7, Brno Czech Republic
Gregor, M., Micieta, B. & Bubenik, P. (2005), Planovanie
vyroby, Zilinska univerzita v Ziline, ISBN 80-8070-427-9, Zilina Slovak
Republic
Pinedo, M., L. (2009), Planning and Schedulling in Manufacturing
and Services, Springer, ISBN 978-1-4419-0909-1, Dordrecht Netrhlands
Stevenson, W., J. (2009), Operations management, McGrawHill, ISBN
978-0-07-337784-1, Columbus USA
Wannenwetsch, H. (2010), Integrierte Materialwirtschaft und
Logistik, Springer, ISBN 978-3-540-89772-9, Heidelberg Germany
