Concept development for designing an optimal production planning and contro

As opposed to the widespread use of lean in discrete manufacturing industries such as automobile, motorcycle or computers, Process Industries have historically lagged behind in the application of lean practices due to the rigid conditions of their manufacturing activities (e.g. inflexible equipment, long set-ups and expensive changeovers). However, even process industries present some degree of discretization as introduced by some authors [ABDU07, POOL11]. In addition to the discretization point of a process manufacturing environment, recent studies presented by several scholars [KING09, KING13, LYON13, PACK14] have highlighted the importance of analysing the manufacturing environment in detail in order to classify products and production resources for optimizing production planning and control processes. This work takes a real example as a case-study to analyse the manufacturing environment in the Process Industry. Besides analysing the current manufacturing operations, this study will also assess the impact of the implementation of a new semi-continuous production process in the factory. Finally, it will suggest a lean production planning and control approach based on Josef Packowski’s High-mix Rhythm Wheel [PACK14]