Impact of Production Run Length on Supply Chain Performance

This paper documents an experiment designed to show the value of simulation in understanding the relationship between production run lengths and overall supply chain performance. Current production practices and supply chain policies of an existing company provided the starting point for the experiment. The experiment consisted of two deployment scenarios and a range of run length multipliers that vary the company's actual run length rules. Minimum cost run lengths were determined for twelve combinations of cost assumptions for changeovers and inventories. 1 THE VALUE OF FOCUSING ON RUN LENGTH It is difficult for production schedulers to take into account all of the cost and customer service consequences of production run lengths. It is human nature for production planners to place a high value on the easily quantifiable benefits of longer run lengths but the costs resulting from longer runs are more difficult to quantify. A better understanding of the full impact of production r...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: WSC
• Authors: David J. Parsons, Robin J. Clark, Kevin L. Payette
• Keywords: Modeling And Simulation, Production Run Lengths, Run Length, Supply Chain, WSC 2004