Computerized shop floor scheduling

Computerized shop floor scheduling is probably one of the most glaring examples of an area in which the tremendous efforts and investments of a large number of companies have produced at best only a partial solution. One of the more successful attempts is known as OPTR (optimized production technology) on which numerous papers have been published highlighting the various aspects of this package. What was realized by only a small group of people, namely the user base, was that this package was evolving at an incredible rate from one year to the next. This article describes that evolutionary process from basically a computerized Kanban to an attempted computerization of the Drum-Buffer-Rope technique. The major emphasis will not be so much on the technical developments, but more on the reasoning—gained from the experience of implementing this package—that brought this evolution so quickly to its ultimate conclusion. Namely, the real key lies mainly in the conceptual framework under which we run our organizations.