OPERATION SCHEDULING WITH GT AND PBC

Generations of managers in industry and of academics in universities, have been intrigued by the problem of how to plan, and more recently how to automate the scheduling of the operations needed to make parts, on the machines and other work centres in a factory. The usual solution is: 'Tell the foreman to do the best he can'. This paper submits that the introduction of group technology (GT), coupled with period batch control (PBC), so simplifies the problem, that with minor analytical assistance the GT group foremen can do their own operation scheduling, more reliably and cheaply than it can be done by the computer.