Title: Improving Organizational Efficiency: A Comparison of Two Approaches to Aggregate Production Planning
Abstract: The aim of this research is to investigate the utility for an organization of maintaining a constant work force, rather than varying it - by means of aggregate production planning (APP) techniques - under the same conditions. For this purpose, outcomes from the charting technique with those from the linear programming technique under low, medium and high demand variability conditions are compared. The solution provided by the linear model was not found to be practically preferable to the solution obtained using the simple charting technique with constant work force. Although total costs were significantly different (mainly due to inventory cost), the production rate, labour force level, and cash balance were not significantly different. The results suggest that to maintain a constant work force level, even during periods of low demand, the relative savings in cost may not compensate for employees' dissatisfaction. Furthermore, this cost savings may not justify the loss of a company's organizational social responsibility image resulting from varying the size of the work force level. Therefore, it is recommended that under the circumstances investigated in this paper managers adopt aggregate production planning approaches which favour the stability of human resources in the organization. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Introduction Today's Business organizations are being called upon to operate in a technology-driven, and intensely more and more competitive operational environments. In such operational environments, achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage is no easy task. In this context, the competitiveness of the organization is very much contingent on its ability to operate as a dynamic, open operational system. The effectiveness of this system is determined by certain success factors related to the different aspects of organizational performance. While systems efficiency is needed in order for the organization to be competitive, efficiency alone may not necessarily lead to competitiveness. Other factors such as quality, innovation, and flexibility may actually play more critical roles in shaping the competitiveness of the organization (Camison and Lopez 2010). As an open operational system, the organization must adopt operational practices which are consistent with the open system orientation. In this context, the open system organization must be able to read the competitive environment in order to determine the demand, which reflects the customers' timely requirements. Once the demand is determined, the organization must devise operational plans to meet the demand. A central to these plans is the availability and extent of utilization of the work force. Aggregate Production Planning (APP) is the process, which generates and evaluates these pians. Background Production management techniques have received considerable attention from students of operations management. In this context, pure and mixed strategies have been proposed in order to determine the combination of work force size, subcontracting and inventory levels that generate a minimum production cost over a specific planning horizon. Inventories are used as a buffer between the different stages of the production process, and between production capabilities and the customers. Changing the level of work force allows the organization to produce the exact demand requirements, while keeping stock variations to the minimum. Although innovative operational philosophies, such as Just-in-time (JIT), consider inventory as waste, still, a significant portion of the working capital, in many organizations, is tied up in inventory. In this context, the effective management of inventory is vital to the competitiveness of the organization. Due to the open system orientation of today's organizations, the focus of modern production planning (PP) is on the development of production philosophies, approaches, and models, which take into account many important factors, others than operational cost. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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