Improvement of Material Flow in the Production and Supply Chain of ...

JIT was firstly occurred in Japan in the early 1970s. It decreases waste by supplying
parts only when the assembly process ask for them. And the heart of JIT is the kanban
card. (12MANAGE, viewed 2008) “In a JIT environment, both earliness and tardiness
must be discouraged since early finished jobs increase inventory cost while late jobs
lead to customers’ dissatisfaction and loss of business goodwill” (Wong, Kwong & etc.,
2006). The typical attention areas of Just-In-Time include: Inventory reduction;
Smaller production lots and batch sizes; Quality control; Complexity reduction and
transparency; Flat organization structure and delegation; and Waste minimization.
(12MANAGE, viewed 2008) Even though, there is a high risk of the reliability of
suppliers. And the production might be great influenced by the cost of material and
market. In this paper, when discuss the filed of optimize the supply chain management,
it would be considered to use the JIT method.
Lean production was raised by MIT (Massachusettes Institute of Technology). It is an
approach to improve a manufacturing performance. The key of lean production is the
minimization of the amount of all the resources used in the various activities of the
enterprise. At all levels of the organization lean production employ teams of
multi-skilled workers. Except that it use highly flexible, increasingly automated
machines to produce volumes of products in potentially enormous variety. It helps
identifying and eliminating no value adding actives in design, production, supply chain
management, and dealing with the customers. (12MANAGE, viewed 2008)
Agile Manufacturing is based on low cost and high quality, improve and change the
productions following the market as soon as possible. The keystone of AM is time.
During the whole cycle life of production, furthest satisfy the customers’ requirements
to enhance the enterprise ascendancy.
Theory of Constraint is used to continually improve and solve the constraint of
bottleneck resources during the production material flow. The application of TOC is
broad in various industries, for example Distribution, Supply Chain, Project
Management, etc. The rationale of TOC is to find out the bottleneck in the production
line, and try to solve the problems in order to make the production cycle short, also
reduce the inventory. The thinking processes of TOC give us a series of steps, which
combine cause-effect and our experience and intuition to gain knowledge. TOC can
lead people how should they think. By this way, the manager can better understand the
world around and better understand how to improve. (12MANAGE, viewed 2008)
Depend on the project researched in this paper, production line model to simulate
assembly line and improve supply chain management will be set up. Simulation is an
important topic in a wide scope, and it is a powerful and economical way to solve
problems. With the development of society and technology there are more and more
kinds of simulation software. Some of the simulation software have mentioned and
discussed in the first chapter. Here only gives a short abstract. Discrete event
simulation has traditionally been defined by items. This modeling paradigm has served
the simulation industry well, but fell far short for many industries in which the pieces
6