Joint Planning of Product / Process Configuration

The growing variety of market demands calls for manufacturing systems which allow a fast inclusion of a new product into the production streams, but with an easy modification of the process. To have at disposal a system of this type, the re-organization of the process and its management implies to approach two complementary problems: 1) a post-ponement (PP) problem, that means to recognise the new characters of the innovated product such to specify its difference with respect to the set of other products already processed, and to adjoin the new working sequence in the existing processing program; 2) an order-fulfillment (OF) problem, that means to include the production flow required for the new product, within the programmed flows pattern already under processing in the SME network, by adding the minimum possible innovations to the network itself. The paper will discuss a solution of the joint PP & OF problem, and illustrate a set of procedures to be applied.