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Abstract
Because over $2 billion was spent on overtime at US and Canadian automotive final assembly plants in 1994, identifying ways to reduce overtime can have a significant effect on the cost of producing vehicles. Traditionally, as described in this paper, overtime has been used to satisfy daily production quotas of finished product. But automotive assembly plants can run selected stations overtime to prepare for the next day. By adjusting the contents of the stations’ buffers at the end of the day, such ‘preventive overtime’ reduces blocking and starving tomorrow, which in turn reduces the need for overtime to meet tomorrow’s quota. The new heuristic described in this paper accommodates the practical industrial limitations of poor availability of data and minimal computational capabilities, yet makes a significant improvement over current practices.
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Notes on contributors
Robert R. Inman
Robert R. Inman is a Staff Research Engineer in the Consumer and Operations Research Department at General Motors Research and Development Center. His research interests include production control, scheduling, and manufacturing systems. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University and is a member of IIE and INFORMS.