Manufacturing Scheduling Strategy for Digital Enterprise Transformation

Introduction

The question of how to digitally transform the production function of an enterprise requires a multidimensional perspective for a satisfactory answer. All economic actors undergo the intangible and the inevitable process of globalization. Although the globalization aggravates the current affairs of income distribution gap, global climate change, and the culture of consumption -where all play a significant role in economic turmoil-, through supporting the flow of money, goods, services, and people, it is a natural growth factor. Setting aside the monumental concerns on globalization, it is the scientific research and mathematics that drive our well beings and economic progress.

This assumption dates to 17^th century where the classical economics built upon the scientific approach along with Francis Bacon’s empiricism, René Descartes’ rationalism, mercantilists’ foundation of econometrics and William Petty’s “Political Arithmetick”. The economic liberalism that has emerged with the popular French term “laisse faire la nature” by Pierre de Boisguilbert, who implicitly referred to referring to leaving businesses alone and pointing out for minimal government, evolved into an ideology that supports the free-market economy where actors can decide freely on their choices (Kishtainy, 2018).

The theory of economics examines the interdependent relationships of actors with regards to different components such as interest rate, inflation, competition, growth, currency exchange, unemployment, social capital, technological leaps, and so on. Microeconomics, a branch of the economics theory, analyzes the decisions of the interacting actors and the managerial decisions of these actors revolve around the axes of supply and demand, or in other terms, production, and consumption. Production, along with finance and marketing is amongst the main functions of an enterprise. To manufacture goods or produce services, an entrepreneur aims for an optimal resource allocation while searching for ways to minimize cost or maximize profit.

At all economic levels, there have been infinitely many attempts to emphasize the importance of production planning and control activities. The practitioners of production planning and control, from almost every scientific field, have enjoyed a great application area since the First Industrial Revolution, by consulting mathematics, and optimizing for the total factor productivity of capital, labor, and other components of economics. This way, not only the enterprises gain advantage, but also our fledgling economic democracies: There is a growing need for implementing rational planning procedures and intelligent forecasting techniques to tackle globalization issues and to repair weaknesses of various aspects of our livings.

The contemporary approach in today’s daily business practice is the digitalization and quantification of the production processes. Companies strive for insightful analysis to be able to compete in the global economy that promotes the concepts of big data, Industry 4.0, and the internet of things. The digitalization of operational processes in an enterprise addresses the business intelligence and decision support systems of that enterprise. A robust production planning and control solution must encompass all departments of the producing enterprise. The performance of the production planning and control activity depends on the digitalization level and the information obtained from the production processes. To achieve the challenging task of the production planning and control in a rational way, one needs to look deep into the enterprise for practical ways to model and optimize the operational processes.

This study poses two fundamental research questions for digitally transforming the manufacturing activities of an enterprise. The first one is about the advantage of this digital transformation since one should expect an increase in efficiency after digitally transforming the scheduling activities. The second question, as crucial as the first one, is then, how to achieve this digital transformation. This chapter tries to prescribe the basic and practical answers for these two questions.