Track: Supply Chain Management

Abstract

For a successful make-to-order (MTO) production, it is very important for manufacturers to be able to promise the due date. Shorter manufacturing lead time is required to accept the urgent orders. Although maintaining finished good inventory is not allowed in MTO production, having some inventory at a set of critical processes will help reduce the manufacturing lead time. Strategic inventory positioning (SIP) problem is to determine the set of processes to maintain work-in-process (WIP) inventory such that the final product is produced within a given lead time at the minimum total WIP inventory carrying cost. We proposed a genetic algorithm approach for the SIP problem with deterministic processing times at the processes. In this study, we will extend the study to the case where processing times at the processes are stochastic.