MTS

Manufacturing Priorities According to Urgency in PWH

Usually, the manufacturers manufacture to order. That means that each work order on the shop floor is for a specific customer for a given due date. TOC for that environment prioritizes the production orders based on their due dates (for more details please refer to published literature on Simplified DBR).

When manufacturers embrace the TOC solution for distribution, another point of view should be regarded. In this case, the production orders are not for a specific customer and are just covering for consumption from the PWH. Therefore, the right priority should be set not according to time, but rather in the same way the priority in the stock locations for the SKUs was defined - the best priority mechanism is to take the buffer penetration at the site as the priority for the Work order that needs to replenish it. If there is more than one WO for the same SKU - the best priority mechanism is to take again the Virtual BP in the following way:

Every WO looks at the virtual BP of the next WO in production (the one who was released before it) to get its production priority. This ensures that the production is in line with the actual usage of the stock - if the stock has depleted rapidly, the WO will be expedited throughout the production. Every entity in the supply chain is fully aligned and synchronized with the goal of the system - to be responsive to the actual consumption of stocks from the next link in order to create availability otherwise unattainable.