Production planning and control in Finnish manufacturing companies – Current state and challenges

Abstract

In today’s highly dynamic manufacturing environment smooth information flow between different operational levels, especially planning and shop floor-level, is essential to ensure rapid reaction to changes. Unfortunately, the manufacturing companies are facing challenges with their manufacturing operations and management practices and associated information systems. This came clear during the interviews conducted among 25 Finnish manufacturing companies between the late fall 2013 and spring 2014. This paper discusses the results from those company interviews, highlighting the current practices and challenges of manufacturing operations management in Finnish manufacturing companies. The main findings are the following. The production planning and control on the factory floor level are not widely supported by proper IT-tools. Utilisation of Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) systems, including Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems, is still rare. The detailed production scheduling, dispatching and operations control are commonly performed by various MS Excel spreadsheets and paper documents, which are not integrated with other company IT-systems and do not support rapid reaction to changes and disturbances.