Process planning and scheduling for mass customised shoe manufacturing

In the scenario of mass customization, production is a crucial phase of the whole product life cycle. Production planning and scheduling must therefore evolve and adopt new tools that help to obtain a deeper control of what has to be produced in order to satisfy efficiently customer' needs. This is very important in the clothing and footwear (fashion) industry where customer's taste and choices change rapidly according to fashion dictates. In this paper an application in the footwear sector is presented and tested on a prototype of a new factory - an agile production unit - based on the concepts of agile and flexible production. The planning and scheduling module proposed is mainly focused on the short term in order to respond quickly to market needs and changes in a flexible manner. The module is composed of a finite capacity scheduler integrated with a new software based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process decision support system, which considers all the aspects related to order importance as complexity or urgency and assign each order a priority. This SW is able to take into account many intangible factors, as trademark, that are usually submitted to the subjective judge of the production manager (planner) and is completely configurable according to user' needs. The result of the elaboration, that is the priority value, constitutes a fundamental input for the scheduler in addition to the due date of the order. The scheduler has a daily horizon because it is unnecessary to cover a long-time period if things can change every day following market requirements. The scheduler is configured to create all cycle operations for each single item even in order to manage orders composed of one pair or even one single shoe. This is a fundamental condition under a custom-made production focus. This also allows operation fine control and monitoring of the manufacturing process because the control system can identify exactly where each item at each time is in the system. Concluding, further developments are considered within a more integrated ad extended scenario applied to the automated production system in a new project where the full product life cycle including the customer, retailer shop and suppliers are taken into consideration.