The companies are served by a transport enterprise, which ensures the handling of flows between the companies. The capacity of the available vehicles, W1, W2, and W3 respectively, is the same and amounts to 8 units of finished products. The specified travel times for transport vehicles (in conventional time units) are presented in Table 1.
Flow planning in partner companies
The planning process begins with identifying subcontractors capable of carrying out part of the product manufacturing process (identifying sub-suppliers) or checking the production capacities of currently cooperating sub-suppliers. The image of the load on the subcontractors’ systems, before allocating a new process, allows for the determination of the weakest link (network bottleneck), which affects the system’s throughput. This is represented by the enterprise with the lowest available production capacities required to complete the new process. In the case under consideration, the enterprise that constitutes the constraint in the network’s throughput is the manufacturer. This means that it generates the smallest number of elements per conventional time unit. To determine an acceptable production schedule, the methodology presented in, among others, works [3] and [4] was used.
Based on the load structure of machines and equipment and the constraints occurring in the company’s system, the possibility of implementing an additional process is checked. The considered constraints are: capacities of inter-operational warehouses, capacity of the finished goods warehouse, throughput of the internal transport system –
number and capacity of AGV trucks, route structure, truck speed, etc.
As a result of the verification, a set of acceptable variants is determined. One of the variants of acceptable production flow in company M’s system is shown in Fig. 4. In company M’s system, the process can be carried out with a production batch size of bM=4 and a production batch delivery period of T=16. This means delivering a finished product to company M’s output warehouse every 4 c.t.u. (conventional time units) (the common system operating period is also 16 c.t.u.). The cyclical nature of company M’s work therefore imposes requirements on the load of companies A and B’s systems and the transport service between the companies. Knowing the flow organization of company M, we look for subcontractors who can guarantee, with their production capacities, the handling of the assumed production program. In the considered case, we are dealing with three companies: Company A, Company A
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka”, No. 2/2006.