Production Systems Control

In a manufacturing plant, inventories consist of basic materials, good in process, and finished stock. Production planning is concerned with determining what resources (materials,supplies,space,people,and equipment) must be available on-site over time to ensure that manufacturing goals are accomplished. Production control is concerned with timely issuance of available on-site materials to the manufacturing process in such a way that materials are made available in a cost-effective manner where and when needed. The fundamental purpose of inventory is to provide an essential decoupling between unequal flow rates.EOQ and EPQ were early mathematical formulations that considered some of the important costs associated with inventory, but less mathematically rudicable aspects, such as immediacy of quality feedback effects, were not represented in these early formulations. The use of Just In Time (JIT) in recent times has demonstrated that these earlier formulations were therefore significantly incomplete and misleading.
Most manufacturing firms learned to incorporate MRP (Material Requirements planning)systems to keep track of lead times and assembly builds. With the introduction of JIT systems, so much less inventory is work-in-process and is on the production floor for such a short time that, as a component of overall inventories, work-in-process inventory has typically been greatly reduced or even no longer exists as a material category.
The development of the kanban system by Toyota and the concentration of effort on the reduction of setup time by such innovative thinkers as Shigeo Shingo have greatly enhanced the banafits of adopting a JIT philosophy. Reducing the setup time is now seen as productivity opportunity, whereas in the past it was typically ignored-something we wanted to do but never got around to doing.
Quality control and quality assurance promised but often failed to deliver in indentifying quality problem at source. It was never a production responsibility, and so, as a staff function, it rarely got the resources it needed or the attention it deserved for doing the job right. Making quality a production responsibility has focused increased attention on quality needs, and making the production team take responsibility for identifying and resolving quality issues has greatly enhanced the team's effectiveness. The quality control department, a technical staff resource, can now be effectively employed as the technical means of assisting production productivity and of helping quality teams employ the technology needed to resolve problems.
Taguchi techniques, a technical area that for years in the United States has been called design-of-experiments, is a fairly technically demanding area that needs to be applied to production problems by those with sufficient statistical training. A partnership is needed between those in production who have the problems and those skilled in statistical analysis to effectively capitalize on these opportunities.

Source: Industrial Engineering and Management book's

Frederick W. Taylor

Member of the American of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), much impressed by the concepts offered by Towne (Henry Towne of the Yale and Towne Company published a paper Transactions f the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, stressed the need for engineers o be concerned with the econoimic effects of their decisions), was Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor have ofetn been referred to as the "father of industrial Engineering". Taylor offered the concept that it was an engineering responsibility to design, measure, plan, and schedule work.
Taylor, influenced by both Towne and Wentworth, developed the concept that work design, work measurement, production scheduling, and other staff functions were engineering responsibilities. His attempts to implement his concepts revolutionized industrial productivity.
Even more important than the improvement in shoveling productivity was the concept of applying engineering analysis to human work situations. Taylor initiated the practice of performing an engineering analysis of work requirements specifying the exact method, tools, and equipment to be employed, and then training the worker to perform the opearations as specified.
He eventually determined an optimum method of selected workers to perform this task and carefully trained them to perform the task, exactly as he specified. As a result of his analysis, dramatic changes in pig iron handling productivity resulted.
Analysis of the work requirements and specifications for a method to perform an operation is now called work design or methods study. However, Taylor also pioneered the activity we now generally call work measurement. This activity is concerned with determining the amount of time an operator should be allowed for performing an operation.
Taylor invented stopwatch timestudy, which is still used extensively to determine the time to perform an operation, commonly referred to today as a time standard. Taylor development of timestudy led to time standards, which are the underlying basis for control of labor costs and are a necessary input to scheduling and pricing activities in industry.
Industrial Engineering, which represents the science of operations, has not been embraced by many responsible for operations today; they choose to deny its existence a century after its initiation. they choose to believe that operation simply require common sense. the history of engineering is replete with such attitudes. There are firms just today discovering that industrial engineering effectively deals with problems they have been unable to solve effectively throughout their past. In a sense, even today, in some firms, doing industrial engineering work ia a bit like doing missionary work.