Economic Evaluation of Delays Reduction: A Global Approach

Abstract

‘Time-to-customer’ and delays reductions are one of the main preoccupations in nowadays manufacture restructuring. Nevertheless, it is not precisely known when, and in what proportion, delays reduction is economically accurate. This paper aims to create a new global framework to support firm’s decisions in order to quantom time in processes. The measurement of delays requires the co-ordination of production and market analysis. The marketing side is modelled with expert system methods, combining fuzzy logic, fuzzy neural networks and wavelet estimators. A new marketing-mix parameter, namely precision, is included in market modelling in order to represent the impact of delays. These efficient methods allow an accurate forecast of demand and due-dates. The production side is characterised with discrete event simulation to capture the global complexity of production cases. Finally, market requirements and production features are compared to estimate profit losses due to poor production performances.