Provides an automatic spreadsheet approach to developing acceptance sampling plans. The technique described allows the user to develop the plan using any needed values for alpha and beta, rather than being limited to those values included in commonly used tables. This allows for more negotiation...

Analyzing machine investment opportunities from a systems perspective requires an understanding of interdependencies between machine investment and utilization decisions. Machine investment decisions involve determining the number of machines to purchase and their types. Machine utilization...

It is shown that the quick switching system, tightened normal tightened scheme and other switching systems emerge from the generalised two‐plan system involving normal and tightened inspection. The corresponding operating characteristic (OC) functions are also shown to emerge from generalised...

In this paper we develop an approximate model of an inventory control system in which there exist two options for resupply, with one having a shorter lead time. Because the optimal policy appears to be extremely complex, we consider a reasonable extension of the standard (Q, R) policy to allow...

In production scheduling, time performance is usually taken to be the province of sequencing models which take task processing times to be given. However, in practice, processing times can often be controlled by the choice of lot sizes which thus have a major impact on makespan, waiting times,...

There has been a great deal of interest recently in the Japanese approach to manufacturing, growing out of a concern for finding ways to reduce inventories and increase productivity. At this project's inception, its objective was to assess whether the kanban system could perform well in the...

This research examines the effectiveness of alternative strategies for dealing with the problem of order instability, or nervousness, which occurs in Material Requirements Planning systems. Nervousness can be particularly disruptive in multi-level production processes where a change in order...

This paper is motivated by the observation that the Japanese have devoted much time and energy to decreasing setup costs in their manufacturing processes and that there has been little in the way of a formal framework available to use to think about such efforts. The object of this paper is to...

This study explores the due-date performance of job shop control systems which base job due dates on a time-phased representation of the workload and the machine capacity in the shop. The performance is measured by the mean and the standard deviation of the lateness. Two parameters are used to...

The relationship between aggregate safety stock inventory levels and component part commonality is developed. A simulation experiment strongly supports the functional form of this relationship in an uncertain operating environment. Managers can use these equations to assess the trade-offs...