Experimentation of customized shoe production planning, scheduling and control

In this paper we discuss about a management and planning environment for the mass-customised shoe production: a complex and complete IT platform that integrates all aspects related to the selling, design and manufacturing of a customized shoe. In such a platform the full product life cycle including the costumer, retailer shop and suppliers are taken into consideration. To coordinate and control the production workflow, a complete ERP environment was implemented for the management of corporate data base, order and production processing, down to dispatching orders and technical data to the completely integrated plant, mainly composed of computer controlled workcenters communicating through LAN, and external suppliers possibly connected via Internet. The ERP implementation was based on the adoption and adaptation of a commercial tool, taken from the fashion industry. A finite capacity scheduler was also chosen and integrated with the ERP. We describe here some detail of the implementation process, commenting some of the scheduling and control issues arisen during the experimental sales campaign experience.