MRP-3 concurrent integration of planning and scheduling in OKP (one of a kind production)

The current market practices for most capital equipment manufacturers provide them with some special difficulties in production management tasks. These are, mainly: 1. Design changes during the necessary overlapping of the production process. 2. Some degree of uncertainty with supplier's due dates and quality specifications accomplishments. 3. Sensibility of changes and other incidences in the current schedules that operates at the shop floor level. 4. Warnings of a chaotic behaviour in both due-dates and productivity originated by a delay between the coupling of the rescheduling of operations at the shop-floor level and the planning process at the office level. Advanced technology for facilitating integration, lay the concept of the MRP-3, a new production management system specially indicated for the "minibusiness" model of a factory, and which is probably going to give a leap in the next future to the organisational procedures in discrete manufacturing, and in particular in OKP. 1. OBJECTIVES Regarding all that issues, the objectives of the paper are: 1. To establish a reference-model for the utilisation of the MRP-3 system for one to twelve months of lead-time (intermediate lead-times) OKP facility. 2. To make a functional design approach of the MRP-3 in OKP. The reference model is used as an organizational issue leading the way in wich a particular OKP company must interact with the MRP-3 software. Key issues for that are:-The planning integration as a part of the Engineering department.-The "coordination technology" engineer who is going to set and facilitate information structure along the project.-Prompt definitions of the FAS (final-assembly-schedule) and BOP (bill of processes), with assignation of critical materials to each BOP's gantt bar. 2. INTRODUCTION MRP has been largely used in OKP eventually in conjunction with the PERT-CPM. When done, a common practice is performing the first order BOM calculation based on the critical path nodes of the PERT, and the second order BOM is coupled using due date tolerances around the first order calculated ones.This is mostly a tuned and relatively advanced practice, requiring one way (from PERT to MRP) software integration. But the inconvenients are the following ones:. The PERT (or GANTT-BAR correspondent deployment) is lost as a major way of communication along the company due to the breaking from "phases" into "bills of materials". The phases planning is the most natural way of communication at the shop floor level and with the planning-engineering department.. Plant capacity scheduling and rescheduling are not …