Simulation as support for production planning in small and medium enterprise: a case study

The proposed application is related to an Italian small factory that produces, assembles, and sells mechanical components for awnings. In such factories BPR (business process engineering) usually takes place without the support of modeling & simulation although such methodologies have proved to be very effective and helpful. Main reasons for that have to be investigated in the high costs usually associated with a simulation study, especially for data collection, model building and model validation. In order to avoid this problem a general-purpose simulation framework was designed enabling self-build according to production process information stored in a relational database. Moreover, the simulation model was used in conjunction with a statistical analysis tool in order to build the relationship among selected parameters and the proposed objective function by mean of response surface methodology and 2nd order regressions meta-models. Authors applied the proposed schema to several industrial applications obtaining interesting results.