Effect of Production Plan Stability on Lean System Operations

Uncertainties in supply and/or demand combined with rolling horizon planning necessitate a dynamic and flexible production planning process. Production plans are frequently updated as new information becomes available, which may result in a surplus or deficiency in production resources. Flexibility Requirements Profile (FRP) is designated to mitigate these frequent changes by enforcing bounds on production plans in order to maintain a desired degree of flexibility. FRP successfully integrates external market constraint and internal capacity constraint into the planning process; not only to establish stability in planning but also to identify the constraint that is expected to be the bottleneck in the future. In this study, we discuss stability in planning from the lean thinking perspective and explore its role in eliminating non-value added activities such as unnecessary inventory, and overproduction through the utilization of FRP.