Customization of CONWIP for an automotive supplier

Motivation: The production planning and control method CONWIP, which was developed by Spearman et al in 1990, seems to be a promising new approach to balancing the different logistical key perform-ance indicators like leadtime, utilization and inventory. The use of this method is not very widespread in industry yet and will be briefly discussed in this article. A concept for production planning and control is developed for a supplier within the automotive industry in the article and an overview of the current lit-erature about CONWIP is given. This concept is not only based on the theoretical background of CONWIP, but is tailored to fulfill the company’s requirements. The developed concept should be a con-tribution to making CONWIP or derivates of it more applicable in industry. Results: The result of the article is a CONWIP based production planning and control concept which could form the basis for further developments in this area with greater practical application potential. The concept shows, how different business units can be combined to form different planning units, which do not correspond to the business units. A planning unit is defined as one CONWIP loop with its parameters. The link between different CONWIP planning units will be discussed as well as the dis-patching rules used for job prioritization at the individual workstations and work release to the produc-tion system. Some relaxations of the constraints set by the CONWIP system will be discussed too.