Investigating the value of integrated operations planning: A case-based approach from automotive industry

During the last decade, many researchers have focused on joint consideration of various operations planning aspects like production scheduling, maintenance scheduling, inventory control, etc. Such joint considerations are becoming increasingly important from the point of view of current advancement in intelligent manufacturing, also known as Industry 4.0. Under the concept of Industry 4.0, advanced data analytics aim to remove human intervention in decision-making. Thus, the managerial level coordination of decisions taken independently by various departments will be out of trend. Therefore, developing an approach that optimises various operations planning decisions simultaneously is essential. Available literature on such joint considerations is more of the exploratory in nature and is limited to simplistic production environments. This necessitates the investigations of value of integrated operations planning for wide range of manufacturing scenarios. Present paper adopts a case-oriented approach to investigate the value of integrated operations planning. First, an integrated approach for simultaneously determining job sequencing, batch-sizing, inventory levels and preventive maintenance schedule is developed. The approach is tested in a complex production environment of an automotive plant and substantial economic improvement was realised. Second, a comprehensive evaluation is performed to study the robustness and implications of proposed approach for various production scenarios. Results of such pervasive performance investigations confirm the value of proposed approach over conventional approaches.