Production Planning and Scheduling Challenges in the Engineer-to-Order Manufacturing Segment—A Literature Study

Abstract

Production planning and scheduling is a significant activity for manufacturing companies that follow an engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturing strategy. The volatile nature of customer demands and the primary requirement to produce highly customized products generate numerous challenges that affect the efficiency of planning and scheduling operations in engineer-to-order manufacturing. The article presents a literature study to identify the main challenges in production planning and scheduling in engineer-to-order manufacturing. The article also provides a classification of the identified challenges into four different categories. The categorization of challenges strongly suggests replanning or rescheduling as a critical requirement in the engineer-to-order manufacturing segment to attain resilience in uncertain environments.