The planning flexibility bottleneck in food processing industries

Production planners in food processing industries must continuously balance efficient production with flexible performance. On the basis of case studies, we state that flexibility is not only restrained by hard-wired production process characteristics, but also by organizational procedures in the planning process. Planning practice in food processing industries is often not able to make the most of the available flexibility in the production processes, and our analysis shows that existing production planning approaches, ERP systems, and advanced planning systems can only partly resolve this. We propose a planning framework that can help to analyze the flexibility of the planning. The planning framework relates planning events to the way in which planning decisions are structured in the planning organization.