1. Course Summary • Organization: A process providing goods and services based on a set of inputs, including raw material, capital, labor and knowledge. • The scope of the organizational operations is defined by its mission and it is supported by a corporate strategy that seeks to provide competitive advantage based on the concepts of cost leadership, product differentiation and responsiveness. • The competitive advantage sought by an organization is dynamically changing due internal and external developments, and it is strongly dependent on the life cycle of the relevant products and industries. • From an operational standpoint, the aforementioned competitive advantage is based on a set of critical success factors that are enabled through the deployed processes and the adopted operational policies.

2. Course Summary • Product and Process Selection • Focus on the core competencies of the organization • Build synergy among the provided products and services • The role of concurrent engineering, (design for) manufacturability, modularity, postponement, and “green” manufacturing • The role of globalization, mass customization and design for postponement • The advantages (and pitfalls) of outsourcing • Fabrication and assembly in discrete-part manufacturing • Process strategies: Product-based vs. Process-based design and Cellular manufacturing • Systematic approaches to alternative evaluation and selection • House of Quality: Matriculation of the requirements and the supporting features • Break-even points • Decision trees for systematically modelling and assessing the impact of uncertainty

3. Course Summary • Equipment Selection and Capacity Planning • The significance of product and volume flexibility • Process capability • The importance of set-up times • Nominal vs. effective capacity and plant efficiency • Time-phased capacity deployment and net present value analysis • A mathematical programming formulation for combined equipment selection and capacity planning • Selecting an equipment “mix” that will meet the production requirements while minimizing the deployment and operational costs

4. Course Summary • Facility design • Systematic Layout Planning for Process-based layouts • Facilitate material flow • Minimize travel distances • Satisfy adjacency requirements • Assembly Line Balancing for Synchronous Transfer Lines • Allocate a set of tasks to a number of workstations in a way that • Maximizes resource utilization while it observes • Precedence constraints and • Throughput requirements • Heuristical solution: Ranked Positional Weights • Cell Formation • Defining clusters based on some similarity measure • The role of queueing theory and simulation in performance evaluation and design of manufacturing systems • Modelling and analyzing the impact of the process variability

5. Course Summary • Warehouse Design, Basic Inventory Control Theory and JIT • Warehousing Operations • Storage Policies: Randomized, Dedicated and Class-Bassed • Design of the fast-pick area • Cross-docking • Basic Inventory / Replenishment Theory • The fundamental trade-off of holding vs. ordering cost • Economic Order Quantity • The impact of quantity discounts • Accommodating randomness through safety stocks • Continuous vs. Periodic review policies and ABC analysis • Just-In-Time • Its motivation • Its enablers • Its impact: “Push vs. Pull” and KANBAN systems

6. Course Summary • Production Planning and Scheduling • Aggregate Planning: Plan for capacity over an horizon of 12 to 18 months • Aggregate demand synthesis • Basic strategies for accommodating the demand variability and the associated cost structure • Tabular and LP-based approaches • Master Production Scheduling: Develop detailed production schedules for the various SKU’s for the next 3-6 months • Material Requirement Planning: Provide for the components and subassemblies required to support the MPS • (Uncapacitated) Dynamic Lot Sizing • Shop-floor control: Sequence the various lots competing for the capacity of the various equipment units so that the production schedules generated by the MRP explosion are observed.