The impact of setup costs, commonality, and capacity on schedule stability: An exploratory study

This paper examines the effect of setup costs, component commonality, and capacity on schedule stability in supply chains. In particular, this work focuses on the situation where schedule changes over a rolling horizon convey information that is important to successful coordination in the supply chain. A lot-sizing model is deployed within the structure of a designed experiment to evaluate the effects of these design factors on schedule stability. Findings suggest that designing component commonality into products, avoiding the tendency to batch multiple customer orders into fewer production orders, and providing surplus capacity have a stabilizing effect on rolling schedules.