Development of a Collaborative Manufacturing, Planning, and Scheduling System: Integrating Lean and Agile Manufacturing for the Supply Chain

Collaborative Manufacturing Planning and Scheduling (CMPS) is a very important concept in manufacturing intended to improve the competitiveness of firms. To meet customer needs, a business has to have a powerful manufacturing system to overcome challenges. This paper develops a production planning and scheduling framework, an integrated manufacturing, planning, and control approach, called a Collaborative Manufacturing Planning and Scheduling (CMPS) system. CMPS considers multiple machines at each stage and the manufacture of multiple products. It is capable of producing accurate and up-to-date information necessary for decision-making and action taking, under collaborative planning in which all relevant activities are triggered by customers' demand and coordinated by resource analysis/requirement planning and production scheduling/rescheduling. Agile manufacturing requires co-operating with competitors, organizing to manage change, dealing with uncertainty and complexity, and leveraging people and information. In an agile manufacturing environment, the philosophy of CMPS is to provide management with accurate, realistic and up-to-date information, enabling the decision maker to take necessary action to achieve effective production and materials planning and control. The essence of the CMPS system is that it integrates the concepts of lean and agile production. 1. Introduction Supply chains are becoming more efficient and more responsive to the needs of increasingly demanding customers, driven by competitive pressures and supported by developments in information technology (GG). IT plays a major role in integrating supply chains and managing them more effectively. Almost every industrial company is now considering the implementation of an advanced system to manage their supply chain more effectively, to improve customer service dramatically, and to reduce costs (Marjolein, 2003). To meet customers' need, a business has to have a powerful manufacturing system to overcome the challenges. Gunasekaran (1999) emphasized businesses will have to overcome the challenges of demanding customers seeking high quality, low cost products, responsive to their specific and rapidly changing needs. He et al., (2001) also argued that producing customized products in a short time at low cost is one of the goals of agile manufacturing. He et al., (2001), Goldman et al., (1994), and McClellan (1997) defined agile manufacturing as a production process that is able to respond quickly to changes in information from the market. This requires lead time compression in terms of flow of information and material, and the ability, at short notice, to change to a wide variety of products (Kidd et al., 1995). Katayama & Bennett (1999) emphasized agility relates to the interface between the company and the market. Gunasekaran (1999) argued that agile manufacturing requires enriching of the customer, co-operating with competitors, organizing to manage change, uncertainty and complexity, and leveraging people and information. Booth (1996) emphasized that agile manufacturing is a vision of manufacturing that is a natural development from the original concept of lean manufacturing. In lean manufacturing, the emphasis is on cost-cutting. The requirement for organizations and facilities to become more flexible and responsive to customers led to the concept of 'agile' manufacturing as a differentiation from 'lean' organization. This requirement for manufacturing to be able to respond to unique demands moves the balance back to the situation prior to the introduction of lean production, where manufacturing had to respond to whatever pressures were imposed on it, with risks to cost and quality. The move to lean production from agile manufacturing and vice versa is a major challenging task. To achieve this goal in a lean and agile manufacturing, job shop production requires a suitable scheduling system to effectively coordinate all the activities necessary to produce all of the products to meet customers' fluctuating demands on time. …