An Approach for Optimizing the Preparation and Production Planning Process in Single Item Production

The high variability of customer expectations results in the complexity of product development and manufacturing processes, which exists obviously in all types of production systems. One of these production systems with a high level of complexity, is single-item production, which is addressed in this paper. The preparation process in single-item production is usually wasteful and complicated. The question is: how can a product be produced most efficiently in the single-item production process.Recently, due to the increasing application of variant-oriented product modelling, the efficiency of preparation processes has been increased. But deficiency of harmonisation between design and production structures limits the automation of the preparation and planning process after the design process. In this paper, we introduce an approach to restructure the production processes and also harmonise the design and production structures in single-item production system. Due to this structure, a parts list has been adapted. This adaptation promotes the automation of the preparation and planning process. To achieve this goal, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and PDM (Product Data Management) systems should not only be configured but also interconnected on the base of this introduced method. As a result, we put forward an integrated model to minimize circle times in single-item production.