A project scheduling approach to production and material requirement planning in Manufacturing-to-Order environments

Long- and medium-term production planning are tools to match production orders with resource capacity and that can also be used as a baseline for material procurement. The lack of a detailed schedule for the manufacturing operations, however, may cause difficulties in providing a proper material requirements planning and may affect the feasibility of the production plan itself. This paper proposes an approach, based on production process knowledge, to extract scheduling information from an aggregate production plan in order to support material procurement. The proposed approach is applied to an industrial case involving machining center production.