Delivery Date Decision Support System for the Large Scale Make-to-Order Manufacturing Companies: An Electric Motor Company Case

In the make-to-order (MTO) manufacturing environment, one of the important issues is setting attainable delivery dates for customer orders, which significantly affects the performance of the MTO manufacturing. Although this topic has received considerable attention in the literature, most of the efforts took a lower level approach that is concerned primarily with the effect of various delivery date assignment methods on the relative performance of some dispatching rules. This paper proposes the delivery date decision support system which takes a higher level approach of integrating the marketing and production planning functions with the consideration of the current capacity and the workload smoothing. The proposed system has been implemented in a Rotating Machinery Shop and the results of the implementation showed good performance.