Proposal of a framework for the evaluation and comparison of production schedules

Production Planning and Control (PP&C) has been increasingly becoming a critical activity, since competition in the markets is leveraging on a multitude of factors ranging from product quality, to delivery times and pre-sales and after-sales services. Among PP&C activities, scheduling decisions are the final temporal decision-making phase where plant and supply chain managers have to act for fixing any short noticed variations and maintaining satisfying overall production system performances, “assigning scarce resources to competing activities over a given time horizon to obtain the best possible system performance”. In particular, lot of work has been done in the past (and is currently on-going) on Performance Measurement for manufacturing systems at a strategic level. However, at a more operative scheduling level, a comprehensive approach seems to be still missing. In order to provide an answer to this main issue, the paper illustrates the main distinctive features of the PMS-ESS, a performance measurement system for the evaluation of production scheduling systems, and its application in a test case.