Operations reversal: An Investigation of capacitated and uncapacitated models

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1064375 (Table of Contents)

Increasing product and part variety is one of the most distinctive characteristics of industrial competition today. It is generally accepted that proliferation of products results in deterioration in manufacturing/logistics perfomance. Higher product variety leads to higher forecast errors, excessive inventory for some products, and shortages for others. In addition, high product overhead and administrative costs, higher manufacturing costs due to more specialized process materials, changeovers and quality assurance methods are encountered. During a manufacturing process consisting of multiple stages products with high degree of variety are produced. Product may start as a common single engine and takes certain features or personalities at each stage. As more and more identities are added, total number of end products increases. Due to the nature of end products' demand, especially the variation from period to period the production volumes of intermediate stages in a production process vary. Researchers have tried to eliminate the negative effects of high product variety. The strategies produced for reducing product and the level of complexity it possesses can be grouped into two categories, lead time reduction strategies and non-lead time reduction strategies. This thesis is motivated to analyze a non-lead time reduction strategy; operations reversal, which reengineers the manufacturing process by reversing two consecutive stages of the process. It is observed that operation reversal can lead to variance reduction and improves the efficiency of the process. Throughout this thesis, models that characterize the impact of operations reversal are developed and used to derive insights on when operations reversal would be beneficial.