Human Contribution to Collaborative Supply Chain Planning and Scheduling: A Case Study in Automotive Industry

The hierarchical production planning and control has been disputed since the early 1990s and a paradigm shift has emerged that highlights the role of humans in controlling job shops. However, most approaches to supply chain management still follow the conventional hierarchical approach, which establishes the interaction between supply partners at the management control level and does not consider decisional role for shopfloor control level. This study challenges this viewpoint. It discusses human contribution to collaborative supply-chain planning and scheduling within automotive industry. The development and execution of plans in a car manufacturing group and its suppliers are discussed. The research methodology involves an analysis of qualitative data from an ethnographic field study on planning and scheduling practices. Two scenarios of collaborative scheduling are analysed through which it is shown how the operational levels adapt their own strategies to cope with operational variations. The management control systems do not receive detailed information of what happens. They receive aggregate reports of non-conformances during the execution for which they develop compensatory plans and send them to the task control level and the story repeats from the beginning.