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Title: Dynamic Risk-based Scheduling
Lecturer: Mark L. Spearman, Factory Physics, Inc.
Abstract:
In recent years, companies have begun to realize the severity of the risk facing the entire corporation by not addressing uncertainty in the supply chain. Indeed, a recent survey indicated that more than two-thirds of the companies surveyed had experienced a supply chain disruption from which they took more than one week to recover. Furthermore, the study revealed that 73 percent of the executives surveyed had a major disruption in the past five years. Of these, 36 percent took more than one month to recover.
Why does it take companies so long to recover?
Why are so many companies susceptible to disruption?
Do the new "Advanced Planning and Optimization" systems offer any help?
I believe there are at least two reasons why modern supply chains are so susceptible to such disruption: (1) supply chains are not designed with uncertainty in mind and (2) modern planning and scheduling systems and practices are not robust enough to operate under conditions significantly different from those for which they are planned. I will address these and other issues in this talk and also offer a solutionknown as Dynamic Risk-based Scheduling (DRS).
Dynamic Risk-based Scheduling avoids the need to produce a detailed schedule that becomes obsolete as soon as any one of the assumptions changes. Instead of producing a schedule, DRS calculates scheduling parameters that then are used to dynamically determine the schedule. Moreover, DRS provides a method to incorporate recourse strategies in a practical way. For instance, if an alarm indicates there is insufficient capacity, extra capacity can be scheduled before any orders are late. However, deciding how much extra capacity to have and how often it should be used in a difficult optimization problem. The result is a system that is both more robust and more effective than other advanced scheduling techniques.
