Improvement of Manufacturing Productivity and Responsiveness through Integrated Process Planning and Authorizing

Original scientific paper Authorizing can be described as an endogenous system signal that determines whether a job release is allowed or not. Whereas job releases are scheduled in push systems, they are authorized in pull systems since pull-type manufacturing systems are controlled by downstream information. Traditionally, process planning and authorizing are regarded as separate tasks performed sequentially, where authorizing is implemented after process plans have been generated. In view of the fact that their functions are usually complementary, higher productivity and responsiveness can be achieved when they are integrated. Although the studies related with integrated process planning & scheduling (IPPS) are increasingly popular, according to our best knowledge, there is no study researching the integration of process planning and authorizing. This study aims to call attention to the integration of process planning and authorizing through presenting a novel model that is called integrated process planning & authorizing (IPPA). Primary implementation results of IPPA demonstrate that making the integration and hence gaining advantage through integration are pertinent. SMEs can especially get in favour of IPPA because of its slight dependence on (professional) software support.