A supply network-modelling system for a small- to medium-sized manufacturing company

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the profile of global manufacturing has experienced many changes. There is anecdotal evidence that many western manufacturing companies have chosen to expand their manufacturing base across geographical boundaries. The common reasons sited for these ventures are to exploit less expensive labour markets, to establish a presence in expanding markets and in response to the threat of new competition. Whilst a global manufacturing base can prove to have many cost and sales benefits, there are also many disadvantages. Logistics operations can often increase in complexity leading to higher reliance on planning and effective interpretation of demand data. In response, systems modelling has remerged as a fertile research area after many years. Many modelling and simulation techniques have been developed, but these have had very limited practical success. The authors have identified that majority of these simulation techniques rely upon a detailed market structure being known, when this is rarely the case. This paper describes the outcome of a research project to develop of a pragmatic set of tools to gather, assess and verify supply chain structure data. A hybrid collection of technologies are utilised to assist these operations and to build a dynamic supply network model.     

Building Control into the Supply Chain Risk Management Process

Due to the international nature of supply chains, organizations interact by proxy with suppliers that they have little or no knowledge of. Limited knowledge of suppliers’ security practices means less control over overall product security, which can increase corporate risk. Formal risk management is critical to the overall procurement process and the risk to the critical components throughout the acquisition lifecycle can be managed by installing proactive supply chain risk management (SCRM) key practices. A properly managed supply chain is a critical requirement in ensuring trust in an organization’s sourced products. We discuss the assurance process requirements as well as a well-defined and recognized set of system engineering practices that apply scientific and engineering principles to ensure systematic direction, control, and trust.     

An agent-based approach for e-manufacturing and supply chain integration

A major problem facing manufacturing organisations is how to provide efficient and cost-effective responses to the unpredictable changes taking place in a global market. This problem is made difficult by the complexity of supply chain networks coupled with the complexity of individual manufacturing systems within supply chains. Current systems such as manufacturing execution systems (MES), supply chain management (SCM) systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems do not provide adequate facilities for addressing this problem. This paper presents an approach that would enable manufacturing organisations to dynamically and cost-effectively integrate, optimise, configure, simulate, restructure and control not only their own manufacturing systems but also their supply networks, in a co-ordinated manner to cope with the dynamic changes occurring in a global market. This is realised by a synergy of two emerging manufacturing concepts: Agent-based agile manufacturing systems and e-manufacturing. The concept is to represent a complex manufacturing system and its supply network with an agent-based modelling and simulation architecture and to dynamically generate alternative scenarios with respect to planning, scheduling, configuration and restructure of both the manufacturing system and its supply network based on the coordinated interactions amongst agents.     

Robust design of (s,S) inventory policy parameters in supply chains with demand and lead time uncertainties

Demand and lead time uncertainties have significant effects on supply chain behaviour. In this paper, we present a single-product three-level multi-period supply chain with uncertain demands and lead times by using robust techniques to study the managerial insights of the supply chain inventory system under uncertainty. We formulate this problem as a robust mixed-integer linear program with minimised expected cost and total cost variation to determine the optimal (s, S) values of the inventory parameters. Several numerical studies are performed to investigate the supply chain behaviour. Useful guidelines for the design of a robust supply chain are also provided. Results show that the order variance and the expected cost in a supply chain significantly increase when the manufacturer’s review period is an integer ratio of the distributor’s and the retailer’s review periods.     

Additive manufacturing in the spare parts supply chain

As additive manufacturing (AM) evolves to become a common method of producing final parts, further study of this computer integrated technology is necessary. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the potential impact of additive manufacturing improvements on the configuration of spare parts supply chains. This goal has been accomplished through scenario modeling of a real-life spare parts supply chain in the aeronautics industry. The spare parts supply chain of the F-18 Super Hornet fighter jet was selected as the case study because the air-cooling ducts of the environmental control system are produced using AM technology. In total, four scenarios are investigated that vary the supply chain configurations and additive manufacturing machine specifications. The reference scenario is based on the spare parts supplier's current practice and the possible future decentralization of production and likely improvements in AM technology. Total operating cost, including downtime cost, is used to compare the scenarios. We found that using current AM technology, centralized production is clearly the preferable supply chain configuration in the case example. However, distributed spare parts production becomes practical as AM machines become less capital intensive, more autonomous and offer shorter production cycles. This investigation provides guidance for the development of additive manufacturing machines and their possible deployment in spare parts supply chains. This study contributes to the emerging literature on AM deployment in supply chains with a real-world case setting and scenario model illustrating the cost trade-offs and critical requirements for technology development.     

Supply chain product visibility: Methods,systems and impacts

Supply chain product visibility may be defined to mean the capacity of the supply chain to have a view of a product’s lifecycle, from its conception, manufacturing, distribution, delivery to the end customer, customer’s experience of the product, and the product’s end-of-life activities and processes. This implies developing and keeping a record of the product’s materials and components, its physical state throughout the supply chain, the product’s forward movement to the user-customer, customer’s experience of the product, and the reverse logistics and reuse or termination of the product. The aim of visibility is to foster planning, control and agility of operations associated with the product and to improve customer experience of the product. “Tracking” is the term often used to describe the determination of the identity and state of a product in the forward direction (from manufacturing to the end user), while “tracing” is used to infer the product’s path and history from downstream to upstream of the supply chain. In recent times there has been an upsurge of academic and commercial interest in product visibility. This interest has translated into numerous architectures, technologies and software for product visibility, both at the atomic (item) and composite (or aggregate) levels. Based on an extensive content analysis of academic and trade literature, including websites and documents of vendors and users of the technologies, this paper captures, analyses, compares and contrasts the design choices, essence, results and current and potential future impacts of some of the recent developments. The study also used survey by questionnaire across industries to assess user requirements of tracking and tracing systems and structures. The paper also charts future research directions for end-to-end visibility of product classes and their instances in supply chains.     

Development of risk based dynamic backorder replenishment planning framework using Bayesian Belief Network

Due to the rapid changes in circumstances of cooperates such as globalization, technical innovation and competition, inter-dependence among cooperates which compose supply chain has been intensified. This make cooperates be exposed to various risk and even a small uncertainty can disrupt the balance of whole supply chain. Therefore, in this paper, the framework to develop alternative backorder replenishment plan to minimize the total replenishment cost and expected risk cost has been devised. In order to model the relationship between risks and risk propagation, Bayesian Belief Network has been applied. Moreover, with the fast heuristic algorithm, breath first search and elementary stepwise system based reverse Dijkstra, the alternative backorder replenishment plan can be established. The numerical example shows how to apply the proposed framework and make dynamic backorder replenishment plan considering impact of risk.     

Mass customization in the product life cycle

This study presents an introduction to mass customization in the product life cycle—the goal of mass customization, mass customization configurations, and new customer integration techniques, modular design techniques, flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs), and supply chain management methods. The study reviews three selected books and twenty-one selected papers—early papers that describe the goal of mass customization, early papers that describe mass customization configurations, and recent papers that describe new customer integration techniques, modular design techniques, FMSs, and supply chain management methods. The study shows that the goal of mass customization is to create individually customized products, with mass production volume, cost, and efficiency, that most companies use ‘assemble-to-order’ configurations to create standardized products, and that more work is needed on interactive customer integration techniques, collaborative modular design techniques, reconfigurable manufacturing systems, and integrated supply chain management methods to achieve the goal of mass customization.     

Automatic evaluation of air mission routes with respect to combat survival

Aircraft flying in hostile environments are exposed to ground-based air defense systems. It is not always possible to both accomplish the mission and fly outside the range of the enemy’s weapon systems, especially if the positions of the enemy’s systems are not perfectly known. Automatic evaluation of mission routes from a combat survival perspective could therefore aid the pilots to plan their missions. When updated information regarding the positions and capabilities of the enemy’s systems is received during flight, the route could be re-evaluated and the mission could be re-planed or aborted if it is assessed to be too dangerous.The survivability model presented here describes the relation between the aircraft and the enemy’s defense systems. It calculates the probabilities that the aircraft is in certain modes along the route, e.g., undetected, tracked or hit. Contrary to previous work, the model is able to capture that the enemy’s systems can communicate and that the enemy must track the aircraft before firing a weapon. The survivability model is used to calculate an expected cost for the mission route. The expected cost has the attractive properties of summarizing the route into a single value and is able to take the pilot’s risk attitude for the mission into account. The evaluation of the route is influenced by uncertainty regarding the locations of the enemy’s sensors and weapons. Monte Carlo simulations are used to capture this uncertainty by calculating the mean and standard deviation for the expected cost. These two parameters give the pilots an assessment of the danger associated with the route as well as the reliability of this assessment. The paper concludes that evaluating routes with the survivability model and the expected cost could aid the pilots to plan and execute their missions.     

论制造物联技术与供应链可视化管理

制造物联技术突破了现有制造系统在信息获取、控制、人机交互和管理方面的集成度差以及协同能力弱的局限,通过制造环境下感知设备(RFID、传感器等)的分布式协同提高供应链系统的性能,大幅提高了制造效率.可视化供应链系统创新企业运作模式和业务流程,降低产品成本和资源消耗,为用户提供更加可视化和个性化的服务.     

Systems dynamics modelling of a manufacturing supply chain system

Supply chains are multifaceted structures focusing on the integration of all the factors involved in the overall process of production and distribution of end products to the customers. Growing interest in supply chain systems has highlighted the need to adopt appropriate approaches that can ensure the efficient management of their complexity, enormity and broadness of scope. With the main aim of supply chain management being to optimise the performance of supply chains, attention is mainly drawn to the development of modelling frameworks that can be utilised to analyse and comprehend the dynamic behaviour of supply chains. While there have been only a few supply chain modelling attempts reported in the literature, this paper proposes a modelling framework that is used to simulate the operation of a supply chain network of moderate complexity. The proposed model comprises four echelons and is build around a central medium-sized manufacturing company operating as a typical Make-to-Order (MTO) system. The developed model was built using a systems dynamics (SD) approach. The operations performed within a supply chain are a function of a great number of key variables which often seem to have strong interrelationships. The ability of understanding the network as a whole, analysing the interactions between the various components of the integrated system and eventually supplying feedback without de-composing it make systems dynamics an ideal methodology for modelling supply chain networks. The objective of the paper is to model the operation of the supply chain network under study and obtain a true reflection of its behaviour. The modelling framework is also used to study the performance of the system under the initial conditions considered and compare it with that obtained by running the system under eight different scenarios concerning commonly addressed real-life operational conditions. The modelling effort has focused on measuring the supply chain system performance in terms of key metrics such as inventory, WIP levels, backlogged orders and customer satisfaction at all four echelons. The study concludes with the analysis of the obtained results and the conclusions drawn from contrasting the system’s performance under each investigated scenario to that of the benchmark model.     

Evaluating flexibility on order quantity and delivery lead time for a supply chain system

Most of the previous literature on production flexibility is centred on the flexibility of manufacturing systems. However, the manufacturing system is just one of several key components of a supply chain. A supply chain is a network involving all of the activities within individual organisations that link material suppliers, manufacturing factories, distributors, warehouses, retailers and customers. Research into the flexibility of a supply chain therefore extends from the intra-organisational flexibilities to the inter-organisational flexibilities. This article provides a study of examining two aspects of supply chain flexibility: order quantity flexibility and lead time flexibility, which have been clarified as the two most common changes which occur in supply chains. Order quantity flexibility refers to the ability to provide proper order quantity for customer needs. Lead time flexibility allows customers to set the order due date depending on their needs. A simulation model is built to evaluate the performance on different flexibility levels of a supply chain. The experimental results provide interesting insights and can be applied in selecting suppliers with order quantity flexibility and delivery lead time flexibility.     

A hierarchical model of the impact of RFID practices on retail supply chain performance

The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of radio frequency identification (RFID) practices on supply chain performance. We examined eight variables of RFID applications grouped in two categories: location (supplier’s warehouse, retailer’s central warehouse, retailer’s local warehouse, retailer’s owned stores) and utilisation (standards, transportation, pallet level, specialised software). Given the inherent difficulty in assessing supply chain performance and the widespread use of different performance models, such as the SCOR and balanced scorecard, we developed a list of performance indicators. Factor analysis produced 7 supply chain performance factors: supplier, inventory, distribution, ordering, plan, sales, and forecasting.Empirical data were collected via an online survey administered to 300 retail companies. 130 usable questionnaires were returned, for a 43.3% response rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide an analytical model that places supply chain performance indicators as dependent variables in a hierarchical regression equation with RFID variables as independent variables. Results found that the implementation of RFID practices significantly affect the supply chain performance in the following areas: supplier, inventory, distribution, plan, sales, and forecasting. RFID can improve the performance of distribution systems, including products dispatched and inventory in transit by 33.8% and stock availability by 45.6%. This study contributes to both the RFID and the supply chain performance literatures. Limitations and suggestions for further research are also discussed.     

风险规避下不同权力结构闭环供应链决策研究

将制造商风险规避行为特征考虑到不同权力结构闭环供应链博弈模型中,利用均值-方差理论探讨风险规避行为和权力结构对闭环供应链决策的影响。研究表明：随着制造商风险规避程度的提高,各权力结构下的批发价、绿色度、零售价和产品性价比逐渐降低;市场中领导者的先动优势总会使其制定出更加有利于自身的决策。对于制造商而言,在零售商主导和无权力结构的市场中,适度的规避风险有助于其效用的提高,而在自身主导的市场中,风险规避行为反而对其不利;当消费者对产品绿色品质的追求较低时,处于无权力结构的市场最有利,否则处于零售商主导的市场会更有利,然而无论消费者处于何种权力结构的市场,制造商风险规避行为都会对其产生负面影响。     

The role of the customer order decoupling point in production and supply chain management

In order to compete successfully, operations in any type of firm need to be strategically aligned to the market requirements. This concerns both manufacturing and supply chain operations. The customer order decoupling point (CODP) is getting increasing attention as an important input to the design of manufacturing operations as well as supply chains. This paper investigates the impact of the position and role of the CODP on issues of concern for production and supply chain management. The focus is on the design and strategic planning aspects of the supply chain, and the design of manufacturing planning and control systems. The paper proposes a dual design approach for production and supply chain planning systems; one type of system for operations upstream the CODP and another type of system for downstream operations in order to fully support the characteristics and objectives of each respective part of the supply chain.     

Automotive engineering curriculum development: case study for Clemson University

The automotive manufacturing industry has transitioned in the past 20 years from a central technical focus to an integrated and globally distributed supply chain. As car makers outsource not only a greater portion of their manufacturing, but also their technical design responsibility, a more thorough understanding of both design and manufacturing changes’ effect on total vehicle and total production system performance and cost is critical. The distribution of technical responsibility in automotive manufacturing has motivated the development of a specific curriculum in Automotive Engineering at Clemson University in South Carolina, USA, with core focus on the interaction between systems, both in design and manufacturing. In this development, a detailed survey of automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers and major suppliers was carried out. The differences in perceived need between these organization types is explored, and the incorporation of these perceived needs to a new Automotive Engineering curriculum is presented.     

模糊环境下考虑零售商风险偏好的绿色供应链博弈模型

在模糊需求环境下绿色供应链运作系统中,研究由单一制造商和单一零售商组成的两级绿色供应链.首先,引入创新成本,分别建立风险中性制造商为主导者,具有中性、悲观和乐观等风险偏好的零售商为跟随者的两级绿色供应链Stackelberg博弈模型;然后,推导出最优决策的期望值和机会约束规划模型,并进行算例分析,比较产品绿色度、批发价格及零售价格与不同置信水平之间的相互影响,探讨具有不同风险偏好的零售商对模糊绿色供应链中制造商、零售商及供应链整体运作绩效的影响.研究结果表明:悲观决策模型中,伴随置信水平的增加,产品的绿色度水平、批发价格及创新成本逐步下降,零售价格、制造商、零售商及绿色供应链整体利润逐步上升;在乐观决策模型中,结论相反.     

Agent-Based Systems for Intelligent Manufacturing: A State-of-the-Art Survey

Agent technology has been considered as an important approach for developing distributed intelligent manufacturing systems. A number of researchers have attempted to apply agent technology to manufacturing enterprise integration, supply chain management, manufacturing planning, scheduling and control, materials handling, and holonic manufacturing systems. This paper gives a brief survey of some related projects in this area, and discusses some key issues in developing agent-based manufacturing systems such as agent technology for enterprise integration and supply chain management, agent encapsulation, system architectures, dynamic system reconfiguration, learning, design and manufacturability assessments, distributed dynamic scheduling, integration of planning and scheduling, concurrent scheduling and execution, factory control structures, potential tools and standards for developing agent-based manufacturing systems. An extensive annotated bibliography is provided.     

Understanding safety and production risks in rail engineering planning and protection

Much of the published human factors work on risk is to do with safety and within this is concerned with prediction and analysis of human error and with human reliability assessment. Less has been published on human factors contributions to understanding and managing project, business, engineering and other forms of risk and still less jointly assessing risk to do with broad issues of ‘safety’ and broad issues of ‘production’ or ‘performance’. This paper contains a general commentary on human factors and assessment of risk of various kinds, in the context of the aims of ergonomics and concerns about being too risk averse. The paper then describes a specific project, in rail engineering, where the notion of a human factors case has been employed to analyse engineering functions and related human factors issues. A human factors issues register for potential system disturbances has been developed, prior to a human factors risk assessment, which jointly covers safety and production (engineering delivery) concerns. The paper concludes with a commentary on the potential relevance of a resilience engineering perspective to understanding rail engineering systems risk. Design, planning and management of complex systems will increasingly have to address the issue of making trade-offs between safety and production, and ergonomics should be central to this. The paper addresses the relevant issues and does so in an under-published domain – rail systems engineering work.