Development of a decision-support system for the formulation of manufacturing strategy

Corporate strategy can be divided into various substrategies, such as marketing, manufacturing, research and development, etc. In the current enterprise environment, products are highly varied and product life-cycles are shortening owing to customers' changing needs and market competition. In such an environment, the formulation of a good manufacturing strategy is critical for the success of manufacturing enterprises. In this research, for the establishment of good manufacturing strategy, we propose a framework enabling a decision-support system for the modelling and analysis of the manufacturing system. For this task, we have constructed a single integrated object model that contains information about products, processes and resources in the manufacturing system. The model is flexible, allowing the objects in the model to be defined according to the levels of detail required by analysis. The process model can then be transformed to a generalized stochastic Petri net (GSPN). Furthermore, a Petri net separation procedure is presented to relieve the complexity of the analytic method. By using the analytic analysis of GSPN, the system throughput is easily obtainable. An example is included to demonstrate the applicability of this framework. The proposed decision-support system for manufacturing strategy formulation enables (1) the analysis of the relationship between strategic input variables and performance measures, (2) the scenario evaluation for coordination between the manufacturing department and other departments, and (3) the formulation of manufacturing strategy using what-if analysis against dynamic manufacturing environments.