Jean-Marie Proth

Supply Chain Engineering considers how modern production and operations management techniques can respond to the pressures of the competitive global marketplace. It presents a comprehensive analysis of concepts and models related to outsourcing, dynamic pricing, inventory management, RFID, and flexible and re-configurable manufacturing systems, as well as real-time assignment and scheduling processes. A significant part is also devoted to lean manufacturing, line balancing, facility layout and warehousing techniques. Explanations are based on examples and detailed algorithms while discarding complex and unnecessary theoretical minutiae. All examples have been carefully selected from an industrial application angle. This book is written for students and professors in industrial and systems engineering, management science, operations management and business. It is also an informative reference for managers looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their production systems.

The authors of this book have been in charge of over thirty industrial contracts of various length (from six months to three years); the companies involved covered a wide range of industrial activities, including steel making, hot and cold rolling, aerospace research, automobile manufactur­ ing, chemical manufacturing, coal mining, bronze casting, and mechanical engineering. All contracts were related to problems connected either with the preliminary design of production systems or with the management of these systems. The problems that the authors investigated involved not only designing and scheduling, but also the modeling, analysis, and evalua­ tion of production systems. The book is based to a large extent on the experience gained in working on these contracts and the mathematical procedures presented are those that have been applied during the course of work on at least one of the contracts. Moreover, the authors have always kept in mind an idea which seems pivotal in the world of industry: the difficulty in companies lies much more in determining the exact nature of a problem and defining the criteria to be taken into account, than in solving the problem itself.

M. Silva Significant changes have been occurring in industrialized countries since the Second World War. Production is moving towards sophisticated high­ qUality products, economy of scale has been replaced by economy of scope, jerky demands are progressively replacing steady demands, and competi­ tiveness is becoming a worldwide phenomenon. These trends require highly automated manufacturing systems with small set-up times and high flex­ ibility. As a consequence, implementation and running costs of modem manufacturing systems are drastically increasing, whereas their fields of application remain limited, and every day become even narrower, which increases the risk of early obsolescence. This is the reason why designers are trying to improve the preliminary design phase, also known as the 'paper study phase'. The preliminary design phase includes, but is not limited to, the func­ tional specification, and the evaluation of the system. Many tools exist to support the functional specification of manufactur­ ing systems. IDEFO is one of these tools. It leads, using a top-down ap­ proach, to a precise functional description of the required system. However, its use cannot be extended further. In general, the evaluation starts with a modeling step, which depends on the evaluation tool used, and ends by applying the model to find out its main dynamic characteristics. Two main approaches can be used to perform this task, namely simulation and math­ ematical approach. Using simulation, the modeling tool is either a classical computer language, or a simulation language.

Supply Chain Engineering considers how modern production and operations management techniques can respond to the pressures of the competitive global marketplace. It presents a comprehensive analysis of concepts and models related to outsourcing, dynamic pricing, inventory management, RFID, and flexible and re-configurable manufacturing systems, as well as real-time assignment and scheduling processes. A significant part is also devoted to lean manufacturing, line balancing, facility layout and warehousing techniques. Explanations are based on examples and detailed algorithms while discarding complex and unnecessary theoretical minutiae. All examples have been carefully selected from an industrial application angle. This book is written for students and professors in industrial and systems engineering, management science, operations management and business. It is also an informative reference for managers looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their production systems.