Controlling just-in-sequence flow-production

Analyses of the customer-order process in the automotive industry show that the vision of perfectly synchronized material flows in complex industrial production and logistics environments is still far from having become reality. The traditional strategy of maintaining high safety stock levels to counter the effects of ever more variety and uncertainty in the customer demand leads to unbearable cost in today’s competitive markets. Moreover, the responsiveness in the complex supply networks remains low. Thus, the goals of short order lead-times and on-time deliveries to customers are often missed. This places urgency onto the implementation of highly flexible logistics and production systems. The concept of just-in-sequence flow-production promises to allow for both accommodating rising degrees of product variety and cost efficiency. However, its success is dependent on reliable logistics and the ability to avoid turbulences within the material flows. Thus, it needs control of the stability of order sequences and intelligent strategies to hedge against any disturbances that cannot be proactively removed in the production flow. This paper suggests the introduction of systematic key performance indicators to make process instability transparent and manageable. Based on that, dimensioning methods for hedging against inherent sequence instability of production processes by means of physical or virtual re-sequencing are presented.