مدل یک سیستم پشتیبانی تصمیم گیری برای تنظیم ظرفیت و هماهنگی حداقل هزینه در افق برنامه ریزی کوتاه مدت و میان مدت

Because fluctuations in demand will increase in future, producing companies will have to adapt their available capacity regularly, always taking the total production costs into account.In practice, planning of available capacity is being realised without a comprehensive evaluation of changeover costs of total costs. The aim of the presented approach is to support companies in choosing an adequate strategy for a least-cost and harmonized capacity adjustment in the short- and medium-term planning horizon. This also represents a first step towards a new planning approach, enabling not only the systematic utilization of flexibilities of orders, but also of manufacturing resources.

Over the last years, high fluctuation in demand forced companies to adjust their capacities gradually. According to many experts, this phenomenon will show a significant increase [1]. Due to increasing globalization of business competition and demand, companies will have to adapt their capacity level to the customer demand more often, while giving full thought to efficient cost structures. SMEs (=small and medium sized enterprises) in particular are going to face greater challenges, since they are more vulnerabl e to “cost - pressure”, because of their relatively insignificant market-share [2]. In addition, they are strongly limited in taking actions and adjusting a different strategy, due to their narrowed and confined financial and human resource s [3]. This hypothesis was confirmed through a survey in machinery and plant engineering industry, conducted and carried out by Grundmann und Reinisch [4]. Since one can expect that fluctuations in demand cannot be levelled totally [5], those turbulences have to be handled somehow [6]. This shows that a continuous adaption of production volume and mix is necessary to fulfil the requirements of the international markets [7].

Results so far provide a standardised procedure, including related tools to conceive, to parameterize and to visualize degrees of freedom in terms of capacity adjustments, and consequently a procedure to find a cost-optimal capacity adjustment strategy. The existing weaknesses in the results will be eliminated in the on- going work. Funding for a research project, in which a fully ERP- integrated decision support system for capacity adjustment will be developed, has just been granted. This decision support system will surpass existing solutions in ERP and MES (=Manufacturing Execution Systems) -systems and improve short and medium term capacity planning.