A Bottleneck-based Study Of Response Time Optimization And Control In Build-to-order Supply Chain

With the globalization of market, increasing competition has led companies to face a more dynamic and uncertain environment with the main characteristic of offering a higher and higher level of customization. The need for companies to customize their production increases the importance of the build-to-order supply chain (BTO supply chain). But management methodologies developed for a repetitive production (see for example the use of Kanban) cannot be easily transferred to realities of this kind because of the various sources of uncertainty that distinguish such a BTO manufacturing environment from the make-to-stock (MTS) configuration. The main elements that make it difficult to control BTO realities precisely are: imbalanced demand, variety products, complex batch group composition, emergent delivery, system capacity with random fluctuation, bottleneck shifting. Moreover, suppliers of low production efficiency (supply bottleneck) are always prominent in this type of supply chain, which directly affect the overall chain's responsiveness to meet the end customers' satisfaction.A method of time bottleneck identification in BTO supply chain is established. First, the concept of time bottleneck in the BTO supply chain is proposed. Then because of deficiency of the existing ways to eliminate bottlenecks, a new theoretic approach to bottleneck identification in BTO supply chain is introduced. At last, by using this approach, suppliers of low production efficiency (supply bottleneck), which directly affect the overall chain's responsiveness to meet the end customers' satisfaction, is defined, and its implications for production control are discussed.In order to eliminate the above time bottleneck in BTO supply chain, a bottleneck-driven control model of shortening the entire response time in BTO supply chain is developed. The new model is taken advantages of the theory of constraints and input/output control. The way of production control and operation management of is described from the perspective of the bottleneck control and the order tracking respectively. Quantitative analysis is also give to prove that this new control model can effectively controll the waiting time in the queue , the level of WIP and the entire response time in such a BTO supply chain.Assuming that every stage of the supply chain is time-sensitive, a response time optimization model is established based on the supplier's existing capacity constraints. This mathematical model is the function of minimizing the total cost of the supplier with the parameters such as the service level of supplier, the order arrival rate and the promising due date to get the optimized due date. As the bottleneck is located in the stage of supplier, only decreasing the supplier's production cost that can result in minimizing the overall cost of the whole BTO supply chain.