An analysis of process industry production and inventory management systems
Daina R Dennis, Jack R Meredith
Journal of Operations Management · 2000 · Volume 18 · Issue 6
DOI: 10.1016/S0272-6963(00)00039-5
Abstract
The process industries — those firms that add value by mixing, separating, forming and/or chemical reactions by either batch or continuous mode — continue to lag behind the discrete industries in the identification and implementation of effective production and inventory management (P&IM) techniques. A contributing factor is that the process industries have traditionally been lumped together and contrasted from the discrete industries as a whole, thus leading to misunderstandings regarding individual process industries. From site interviews and the literature, we identified four critical dimensions — planning resource requirements (for materials and capacity), tracking resource consumption, control of work-in-process (WIP), and degree of computerization — represented by seven variables by which to contrast and analyze process industries. Based on in-depth field studies of 19 diverse process plants, we find that there exist at least four distinct types of process industry P&IM systems: (1) simple, (2) common, (3) WIP-controlled, and (4) computerized.
Keywords
Production and inventory management, Process industries
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