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Production Planning at Dupo Plastics

Soontiëns, E.J.P. (2019) Production Planning at Dupo Plastics.

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Abstract:Dupo Enschede B.V. is an industrial supplier of semi-finished technical parts made from plastic, metal and wood in both the Benelux and Europe. The company specializes in furniture legs, bed legs and armrests but offers a wide range of small injection moulded products. Custom made products are manufactured by Dupo Plastics, a plastic injection moulding company which was added to the trading firm. Currently, the production planning at Dupo is made manually, using a paper schedule. Orders are often scheduled in the sequence in which they arrive at the factory, which leads to a production schedule that is found to be inefficient. But why does this problem occur now? The production planning has always been done by hand, but recently Dupo purchased a twelfth injection-moulding machine. This machine adds an extra component to the planning. Also, the available capacity has become smaller compared to the demand. Together this results in an overall more complex production planning, which cannot effectively be scheduled manually anymore. In order to solve this problem, the main goal of this research is to design a tool that automates the production planning process at Dupo. To make the solving of this problem easier, it is divided into smaller research questions. One of them is to analyse the current situation at Dupo. The suitability of a production scheduling method depends on the characteristic of the planning environment. In this thesis, a framework by Jonsson & Mattson (2003) is used to analyse this planning environment. The current situation is defined as a configure to order products environment. The operations in this environment can be classified as assemble-to-order or make-to-order production. Based on these findings, the scheduling method is constructed. Another important question related to the main research goal is how to select key performance indicators that should be present on the dashboard of the production scheduling tool. After conducting research, a method is constructed based on a method proposed by Shahin & Mahbod (2007), combining the analytical hierarchy process with the five generic performance objectives. This method has been successfully applied to the selection process of the indicators. The result of this thesis is a tool that, among other things, schedules the production for the twelve machines of Dupo and a report discussing the development and construction of this tool. It provides a critical analysis of the production planning environment at Dupo, using a relatively unknown framework. It also introduces a new combination of methods in order to make a selection of alternatives, based on the relation to the processes and goals of the company.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Clients:
Dupo Plastics, Enschede, Netherlands
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:50 technical science in general
Programme:Industrial Engineering and Management BSc (56994)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/80218
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