Abstract
Synchronous production is a philosophy that suggests that the right part should arrive at the right machine at the right time to minimize the inventory and operating costs. To achieve this goal a synchronous material flow is required. How ever, this is not an easy task in the discrete manufacturing environment because it requires management commitment and algorithmic development. This paper proposes a time window capacity analysis (TWCA) approach to implement the synchronous production. By dividing the production time into small time windows, simple rules, heuristics and algorithms are developed to assign operations among available resources such that the inventory and operating costs are kept low. The synchronization is achieved by resolving the demands of each operation in the order of time windows. The approach is simple and has been implemented and tested in an actual manufacturing company. The results show that TWCA is practical and promising. TWCA has the potential to be used in either single, multiple, or parallel machines, one stage or multi-stage, job shops or flow shops, and closed or open systems.