From the Inside Flap
Peter Drucker has said that time is the new measure of competitive success. Nowhere is the truth of that maxim more evident than in today’s manufacturing sector, in which increasingly shorter product cycles and guaranteed on-time delivery are essential to competitive survival. But, as Gerhard Plenert and Bill Kirchmier show in this groundbreaking book, companies cannot hope to achieve truly competitive levels of productivity as long as they rely upon outmoded scheduling models. The key to overcoming the costly bottlenecks, wasted resources, unpredictability, and customer alienation bred by traditional infinite capacity backward pass (ICBP), and achieving world-class levels of performance, is adopting a finite capacity scheduling system (FCS)—and now this book shows you how. Finite Capacity Scheduling is the first comprehensive guide to understanding FCS and implementing and exploiting today’s powerful new FCS systems. Based upon the authors’experiences modeling and installing more than 200 FCS applications, the book dispels common misconceptions about FCS and clearly explains why, contrary to popular belief, a well-integrated FCS system works as a natural complement to MRP/ERP. More importantly, it provides detailed guidelines for selecting, implementing, and using FCS technologies to help maximize resource use, decrease inventory costs, increase inventory turnover, improve customer service, and significantly enhance organizational communication and coordination. The authors begin with a fascinating exploration of traditional ICBP as a major obstacle to achieving modern levels of productivity, and why and how FCS can all but eliminate problems inherent to ICBP and transform virtually any manufacturing organization into a world-class competitor. This is followed by an in-depth review of major FCS methodologies, including job-based, resource-based, and event-based models, as well as new and emerging approaches, such as genetic algorithms. The remainder of the book is devoted to practical discussions of how to implement, manage, and measure the performance of FCS installations. With the help of numerous case studies and vignettes, the authors show how FCS can be integrated into a modern MRP/ERP system and management structure, and how to bring about the types of cultural changes required to create an effective FCS-enabled organization. A complete guide to achieving world-class productivity, Finite Capacity Scheduling is must reading for distribution and logistics managers, operations managers, and scheduling and planning professionals in all manufacturing industries.
About the Author
GERHARD PLENERT, PhD, has more than twenty-three years of experience in manufacturing scheduling methods, and is the author of four books on production and operations.
BILL KIRCHMIER is a consultant and educator in the areas of finite capacity scheduling, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering. He has more than thirty years of experience in marketing, sales, application and system integration, and production improvement technologies.
