A simulation study of the emergency department at Vrinnevisjukhuset in Norrköping investigating the patient flow with respect to patient lead time. / <p>Examensarbetet är utfört vid Institutionen för teknik och naturvetenskap (ITN) vid Tekniska fakulteten, Linköpings universitet</p>

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to investigate and understand which significantparameters affect OTD within an ATO company, and furthermore develop a model which wouldenhance proactive work in order to achieve a higher OTD.Design/methodology/approach - The data is primarily of qualitative nature, employing semistructuredinterviews and workshop, with backup from quantitative production data. Anabductive approach was applied by iterating and aligning findings with relevant literature andtheory. These mixed methodologies created a triangulation of data, which through our analysishelp with the validation of our conclusions.Findings - Through our findings we can conclude that significant parameters which lowers OTDfor an ATO company can be found all through the supply chain. For this thesis and its model,parameters were chosen based on their ability to be quantified. For ABB GA Products, we found36 significant parameters as well as a systematic approach for an ATO company to iteratively gothrough them to investigate which orders are affected by which flags. Through this approach anATO company should be able to work more proactively towards higher OTD.Research limitations/implications - This thesis is conducted through a case study at ABB GAProducts only, which should be considered when using the results for further research.Practical implications - Specifies a logical scheme to classify risk of delayed orders.Originality/value - Advances theory in production and operations management regardingperformance measurement, towards a more proactive approach of measuring reactive KPI’s

This paper addresses the existing situation of Supply Chain Management (SCM) in readymade garment manufacturing factories in Bangladesh. Supply chain management is a key issue for garment manufacturers, retailers, and consumers. The literature on current supply chain management in garment factories in Bangladesh is very poor. Therefore, in this study, the author has made an attempt to analyze a more effective supply chain scenario for the Bangladeshi garment industry that will lead to better competitive advantage over their rivals by analyzing the current supply chain and examining the relationships among the actors in supply chain management.

No description available.

The U.S. furniture industry is facing intense foreign competition due to globalization. U.S. Competitiveness Survey identified responsiveness and on-time delivery as the major strategic areas to improve competitive advantage. To enable the U.S. furniture industry to become more responsive to customers and simultaneously ensure on-time delivery, an order promising framework was proposed for a make-to-order environment. The proposed order promising strategy was to implement advanced scheduling based on a drum-rope-buffer control system. A study was conducted on an upholstery manufacturing industry to demonstrate the potential lead-time improvement that may arise from implementing the proposed strategy. To carry out the study, a prototype database application was developed based on the operational policy of the example company to support order promising. The study results showed a possible improvement of 67% in the current lead-time performance of the company. Finally, a set of recommendations was made to develop an order promising system for the furniture industry.

No description available.

The mining industry of the future has a strong focus on sustainability, which for example is reflected in the Swedish mining industry association Swemin´s goal of a mining industry free of carbon dioxide in 2035. To make this possible, a broad investment is now being made in the electrification of mining machines, which is believed to have great potential for reducing emissions. Epiroc Rock Drills AB is a driving force in the transition to battery-driven vehicles and has had electric machines in its product catalog for several years. From 2022, they have started to assemble batteries in-house that were previously assembled by the supplier. This thesis investigates the streamlining opportunities for the assembly process for the batteries ST14, MT42, ST1030 and MLE regarding lead time. First, a description and analysis of the current situation were carried out where five areas were identified to have an impact on the assembly process. This resulted in several proposed general improvements: developing a system for handling proposed improvement, more distinct communication of the quality philosophy, better resource efficiency and improvement of kitting and 5S.  In addition, three new layout proposals were developed which were analyzed and weighted to select the most suitable proposal under the current conditions. The result was a layout where ST14 and MT42 models are assembled in two mixed model assembly lines and ST1030 and MLE are assembled by fixed position. Continued research includes making data collection when the processes are more mature and to apply the data on the study´s suggested improvements. / Framtidens gruvindustri har ett stort fokus på hållbarhet vilket bl.a. speglas i den svenska branschorganisationen Svemins målsättning om en koldioxidfri gruvdrift år 2035. För att detta ska vara möjligt sker nu en bred satsning på elektrifiering av gruvmaskiner vilket bedöms ha en enorm potential för att minska utsläppen. Epiroc Rock Drills AB är drivande i omställningen till batteridrift och har haft elmaskiner i sitt sortiment ett antal år. Från och med 2022 har de även tagit över montering av tillhörande batterier som tidigare monterats av leverantör. För att klara av att möta framtidens efterfrågan undersöker detta examensarbete vilka möjligheter det finns till effektivisering av monteringsprocessen för batterierna ST14, MT42, ST1030 och MLE med avseende på ledtid. Först genomfördes en nulägesbeskrivning och nulägesanalys där fem områden identifierades ha inverkan på monteringsprocessen. Det mynnade sedan ut i ett antal generella förbättringsförslag: utvecklat system för hantering av förbättringsförslag, tydligare kommunikation av kvalitetsfilosofi, bättre resurseffektivitet samt förbättring av kittning och 5S.  Dessutom togs tre nya layoutförslag fram som analyserades och viktades för att välja ut det under förutsättningarna mest lämpade förslaget. Det resulterade i en layout där ST14 och MT42 monteras på två blandflödeslinor och ST1030 och MLE monteras genom fast position. Fortsatt arbete inkluderar att göra ny datainsamling när processerna är mer mogna och applicera det på studiens förbättringsförslag.

Efficient engineering processes are critically important for furniture manufacturers. Engineering impacts the production cost, design quality, product lead time, and customer satisfaction. This research presents a systematic approach to analyze a furniture engineering process through a case study. The research was conducted through a case study in a furniture plant located in China, producing American style furniture products. The first stage was to investigate the company's current engineering process, identify non value-added activities, and analyze the engineering performance based on selected Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as lead time, document error rate, and engineering throughput. A survey questionnaire was sent out to the engineering group to determine the current engineering efficiency. Results show that "product complexity" and "engineer competency" are the two most influential factors that impact engineering lead time and quality. In the second stage, value stream mapping was used to analyze an upholstery furniture engineering process. The approach encompasses an analysis of the current state of the engineering process and the proposal of a lean future state value stream map (VSM). Results from the current state VSM show, that the value-added ratio of the current engineering process is only 26%. Several engineering steps present deficiency such as the processes of creating drawings, compile mass production documents, check and sign-off engineering documents, create CNC programs, and generate packaging files. Based on current state VSM analysis, the researcher focused on transforming these processes to eliminate waste and to propose the best practices for the future state VSM. From this research, it shows that current processes include a large amount of non-value adding activities such as waiting, extra processing, rework, excess motion, transportation, underutilized people, and inefficient information. These non-value adding activities are interfering with engineers' ability to prepare engineering documents for downstream jobs and affecting the overall manufacturing process. The VSM is effective to provide the visual control over the engineering process for implementing lean transformations. / Master of Science

Manufacturing industries in the United States continue to experience increasing pressure from foreign competition. Through decreasing product lead time, U.S. manufacturers can achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Southern yellow pine manufacturing is an example of an industry that can benefit from product lead time reduction. This project involved a case study of a southern yellow pine lumber manufacturer. Value stream mapping was used to evaluate the current lead time for the lumber manufacturer as well as design future state systems. Current state evaluation discovered an average lead time of 35.3 days according to six months of inventory data. Four future state systems were developed according to current demand and had lead times ranging from 10.8 to 14.9 days. Lead time reduction was achieved through more closely synchronizing and planing operations with sawmill output. To illustrate the impact of lead time on financial performance, the amount of capital invested in inventory was evaluated for the current state value stream as well as the future state value streams. All of the future state capital inventory requirements were less than 50 percent of the current state capital inventory requirement. Implementation of future state value streams would allow the manufacturer to benefit from having more available capital. This research project also investigated the use of pull production at the softwood lumber manufacturing operation. Effective implementation of pull production would require improving headrig optimization programs, presorting material by grade before drying, little or no drying degrade, and reducing both drying and cooling time. Due to the technological requirements of pull production in lumber manufacturing, the system was not currently feasible for the lumber manufacturer. Future research efforts should be directed towards creating the technology necessary to economically implement pull production in the softwood sawmill industry. / Master of Science

In this thesis, we study three applications of dynamic resource allocation: the first two consider dynamic lead-time quotation in make-to-order (MTO) systems with substitutable products and order cancellations, respectively; and the third application is a manpower allocation problem with job-teaming constraints. Matching supply and demand for manufacturing and service industries has been a fundamental focus of operations management literature, which concentrated on optimizing or improving supply-side decisions since demand has generally been assumed to be exogenously determined. However, recent business trends and advances in consumer behavior modeling have shown that demand for goods and services can clearly be shaped by various decisions that a firm makes, such as price and lead-time. In fact, competition between companies is no longer mainly based on price or product features; lead-time is one of the strategic measures to evaluate suppliers. In MTO manufacturing or service environments that aim to satisfy the customers' unique needs, lead-time quotation impacts the actual demand of the products and the overall profitability of the firm. In the first two parts of the thesis, we study the dynamic lead-time quotation problem in pure MTO (or service) systems characterized by lead-time sensitive Poisson demand and exponentially distributed service times. We formulate the problem as an infinite horizon Markov decision process (MDP) with the objective of maximizing the long-run expected average profit per unit time, where profits are defined to specifically account for delays in delivery of the customer orders. We study dynamic lead-time quotation problem in two particular settings; one setting with the possibility of demand substitution and another setting with order cancellations. The fundamental trade-off in lead-time quotation is between quoting short lead-times and attaining them. In case of demand substitution, i.e., in presence of substitutable products and multiple customer classes with different requirements and margins, this trade-off also includes capacity allocation and order acceptance decisions. In particular, one needs to decide whether to allocate capacity to a low-margin order now, or whether to reserve capacity for potential future arrivals of high-margin orders by considering customer preferences, the current workload in the system, and the future arrivals. In the case of order cancellations, one needs to take into account the probability of cancellation of orders currently in the system and quote lead-times accordingly; otherwise quotation of a longer lead-time may result in the loss of customer order, lower utilization of resources, and, in turn, reduced in profits. In Chapter 2, we study a dynamic lead-time quotation problem in a MTO system with two (partially) substitutable products and two classes of customers. Customers decide to place an order on one of the products or not to place an order, based on the quoted lead-times. We analyze the optimal profit and the structure of the optimal lead-time policy. We also compare the lead-time quotes and profits for different quotation strategies (static vs. dynamic) with or without substitution. Numerical results show that substitution and dynamic quotation have synergetic effects, and higher benefits can be obtained by dynamic quotation and/or substitution when difference in product revenues or arrival rates, or total traffic intensity are higher. In Chapter 3, we study a dynamic lead-time quotation problem in a MTO system with single product considering the order cancellations. The order cancellations can take place during the period that the order is being processed (either waiting or undergoing processing), or after the processing is completed, at the delivery to the customer. We analyze the behavior of optimal profit in terms of cancellation parameters. We show that the optimal profit does not necessarily decrease as cancellation rate increases through a numerical study. When the profit from a cancelled order, arrival rate of customers, or lead-time sensitivity of customers are high, there is a higher probability that optimal profit increases as cancellation rate increases. We also compare the cancellation scenarios with the corresponding no-cancellation scenarios, and show that there exists a cancellation scenario that is at least as good in terms of profit than a no-cancellation scenario for most of the parameter settings. In Chapter 4, we study the Manpower Allocation Problem with Job-Teaming Constraints with the objective of minimizing the total completion time of all tasks. The problem arises in various contexts where tasks require cooperation between workers: a team of individuals with varied expertise required in different locations in a business environment, surgeries requiring different composition of doctors and nurses in a hospital, a combination of technicians with individual skills needed in a service company. A set of tasks at random locations require a set of capabilities to be accomplished, and workers have unique capabilities that are required by several tasks. Tasks require synchronization of workers to be accomplished, hence workers arriving early at a task have to wait for other required workers to arrive in order to start processing. We present a mixed integer programming formulation, strengthen it by adding cuts and propose heuristic approaches. Experimental results are reported for low and high coordination levels, i.e., number of workers that are required to work simultaneously on a given task.