Improving performance in a shop floor scheduling: a SME case

In the last 30 years the technology evolution has grown firms’ interests in increasing their performance through scheduling systems, requiring at the same time more automation and flexibility. This need of robust methodologies for shop floor planning, being possible by actual powerful information systems and high–performance hardware devices, is relevant also for small firms operating in high competition and high turnover market, that should solve their own production planning problem profitably, exploiting the nowadays available theoretical models. The main objective of this work is to develop and test an on-line computer tool designed to support managerial decisions in optimizing the shop floor schedule in an Italian manufacturing SME, encompassing a group of single machines environment. The selection of a set of relevant performance indicators is done and a data collection activity is carried out in order to depict the as-is scenario; then, static calculations estimate improvement expectations for adopting the proposed approach (to-be scenario), which is twofold: the first part comprehends heuristic dispatching rules and the second one adds a meta–heuristic G.RA.S.P. (Greedy RAndomised Search Procedure). All these procedures aim at minimizing a composed objective function, whose parameters are to be tuned by the decision maker, modelling different relevance of its components (sub- objectives). For supporting the selection of the production sequence of each machine and to build a comfortable decision environment, a simulation software with a user friendly graphic interface is implemented.