A performance metric for production planning systems evaluation

The evaluation of production planning system performances is an important issue both in the academic and in the industrial world. Metrics for performance and value assessment are thus a relevant applied research field. This paper tries to define a group of indicators apt to evaluate the performances of these methods, in order to show the real benefits they can give to the production planning activity. The performances evaluated are: respect of schedule, schedule stability, production lead time deviation and inventory level. The proposed metric is validated through a simulation case study presenting all the MRP complexity-elements. In particular, the test case is focused on the comparison between a traditional MRP procedure and a MRP II closed loop. The performance metric has been created in order to compare different production planning systems through the evaluation of physical indicators in a simple way, in order to be easily understandable and useful also to industrial practitioners