Capacitated planning and scheduling for combined make-to-order and make-to-stock production in the food industry: An illustrative case study

More and more production systems are now-a-days following a combined make-to-order (MTO) and make-to-stock (MTS) production mode. This paper tests the conceptual production planning and inventory control framework, developed recently, for such combined situations. We apply the framework in the case of a firm that produces 230 products on a single line with limited capacity. Areas of improvements in the framework have been identified and possible analytical decision aids are suggested. In particular, the short-term batch-scheduling problem requires more attention and we provide a heuristic to solve that problem. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.