COMPARING CARD-BASED PRODUCTION CONTROL MECHANISMS IN MTO PRODUCTION

摘要

Card-based production control mechanisms are widely used by manufacturing companies operating under MTS (Make-to-Stock). However, existing mechanisms, such as the Toyota Kanban System, do not typically apply to MTO (Make-to-Order) production and high-variability production environments. For this reason companies seek alternative solutions capable of dealing with these production environments. In this paper the card-based mechanisms CONWIP (CONstant Work In Progress), Generic POLCA (Paired-cell Overlapping Loops of Cards with Authorization) and GKS (Generic Kanban System) are compared and refined to facilitate its implementation to MTO manufacturing with high variability of processing times and routings. We evaluate the performance of these mechanisms in a six-stage flow shop, using simulation. The main performance measures considered are the shop floor throughput time, the percentage of tardy jobs and the standard deviation of the lateness. Results provide important insights towards the alignment of card-based mechanisms with the MTO manufacturing.