Production Lots as Determinant of Paper Production Lead Time Performance

Lead time performance of entire production operations, but also the whole supply chain is widely discussed issue in the contemporary supply chain research. After Just-in-Time (JIT) revolution during 80’s, most of the researchers were thinking that lead time is not major research interest subject, after companies have implemented new methods in production and supplier network related operations (e.g. Mistry, 2005; Chen et al., 2005; Kros et al., 2006). However, ever larger corporations in manufacturing, larger factories, offshore outsourcing opportunities, new emerging markets, and larger markets overall to be served by each factory has resulted into the situation that lead time performance is still an issue – for example, in paper production number of mills at European soil has decreased during the last two decades by more than 25%, but production volume has doubled (CEPI, 2007). As purchasing and manufacturing altogether take major proportion from total costs ABSTRACT