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SEEMA MALLAVALLI
JAN 29, 2015
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INTRODUCTION
Production Scheduling for continuous manufacturing systems with quality
constraints is a paper that presents several possible solutions to an actual
production-scheduling problem faced by a chemical plant. DMAIC methodology
is utilized by the authors for developing these solutions. This report, structured in
a similar fashion, presents the analysis of the paper in two sections. In the first
section, an analysis of how well the authors define the problem and validate
Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Business, measure the key performance
metrics, analyze the problem, improve solutions and Control change is
presented. In the second section, a review of the paper in a critical perspective is
presented.
ANALYZE:
The Analysis phase of the DMAIC process necessitates identification of potential
root causes and estimation of the impact of root causes on key outputs. The
paper presents a detailed analysis of various constraints such as capability
constraints, inventory constraints, minimum run length, precedence and resource
sharing constraints, which impact the scheduling process.
IMPROVE:
This phase involves development of potential solutions and optimizing the
solutions for best possible performance of the system. Three heuristic or
sequential optimization algorithms that optimize each of the three objectives are
developed and presented in this paper. The Pull-Backward procedure and PushForward procedure both aim at minimizing the OSR and ADI in two steps. The
Reduce Switchover procedure aims mainly at optimizing TST first and then
considering OSR and ADI.
CONTROL:
This is the last phase of the DMAIC process, which requires implementation of
mistake proofing, solution and ongoing process measurements and identifying
opportunities to apply lessons learnt. The authors attempt to implement mistake
proofing by running 540 simulations to validate the performance of the three
heuristic procedures and the performance measures are evaluated.
II. CRITIQUE:
The paper presents a detailed description of the problem, identification of key
input output metrics, constraints and the factors that affect the production
performance. Even though the authors have done a good job in defining the
problem and analyzing it, there is no mention of the project schedule or a
communication plan. The experiments were performed on industrial data sets.
No metric is presented to analyze the applicability of the data to the current
problem. The authors could have performed the experiments on historical data
from the same production facility. SOPs, training plans and controls were not
developed. As a final conclusion, even though the authors have diligently
defined, measured and analyzed the problem, they did not present significant
improvement techniques and almost neglected the control phase. The paper
lacks appeal due to the unavailability of graphical representation of data
analyzed.