Simulation of synchronous manufacturing at a naval aviation depot

The planning, scheduling and control of repair/remanufacture (REMAN) operations has received considerable attention among practitioners over the past few years, but little attention from academia. The premise of this research is that significant improvements can be made in the planning, scheduling and controlling of REMAN operations by the application of the principles of synchronous manufacturing developed from the Theory of Constraints (TOC). Normally scheduling requires standards relating to part routings and processing times. These standards are not available in remanufacturing due to the stochastic nature of the amount of work and the routings required to rebuild a unit. TOC avoids this problem of standards by (1) identifying the constraint and (2) the use of Buffers and Buffer Management. This approach makes the use of approximations to standards acceptable. The implementation of synchronous manufacturing involves the modification of performance measures and adoption of drum-buffer-rope (DBR) as a planning, scheduling and control system. Synchronous manufacturing does not require the expense of purchasing or developing in-house MRP software, nor does it require the high degree of data accuracy at all points. A model showing if significant improvement could be achieved by a REMAN firm adopting the principles of synchronous manufacturing would be of benefit to practitioners and academics.