A Framework for Production Planning and Control as a Service

Operating manufacturing systems in today's markets profitably is challenging for make-to-order and make-to-stock production. Market demand is volatile, product variants are manifold and customers expect fast delivery, while production systems have to constantly adjust the trade-off between high utilization, high throughput and high responsiveness. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems promise the flexibility to dynamically adjust in this environment, however the achievements of higher computational power, cheaper data storage and faster data transfers have not yet enabled a matching production planning and controlling. Production planning and control systems are not used to their full potential due to low crosslinking under the partners, decision quality is in doubt and available data is not used continuously. Improving this situation through production planning and control as a service by specialized agents promises to be a solution however it isn't widely contracted. In this paper, we shall discuss the expected benefits and tangible challenges for production planning and control as a service to open a path for innovative companies to become client or contractor in a service platform, and offer industry cases of production planning and control as a service engagements.