Proposal of Production Planning and Management System for Implementing Mass Customization

Abstract

There is need for a business model to realize mass customization in the automobile industry. This paper proposes a production planning and management system for implementing mass customization. Firstly, the future collaboration model between a manufacturer and suppliers is introduced. And, a complete designing process for building a production planning and management system is proposed. Secondly, an estimating of unfulfilled order rate which gets the fraction of demand that is not satisfied from components in inventory is derived. Thirdly, we propose an iterative and practical algorithm which solves a production planning problem about mass customization to minimize the inventory holding cost and production cost subject to unfulfilled order rate, production constraints and so on. It is formulated as a probabilistic problem and it is solved effectively by using mathematical programming.