Minimizing the internal supply chains’ operating expenses is a crucial management goal in current transnational enterprises, where manufacturing and retailing often operate independently. Still, managers must periodically evaluate the consolidated operating expenses and performance. The operational goals in the manufacturing units consist of lowering quality- and reliability-relevant costs, avoiding manufacturing delays due to random breakdowns, and meeting order due dates through expediting strategies, such as partial subcontracting and accelerating the fabrication plan. Inspired by efforts to optimize batch runtime for the mentioned intra-supply chains, this study investigates the combined impact of quality-surety actions (including defect removal and rework), correction of breakdowns, multi-delivery, adjustable-rate, and outsourcing on a coordinated producer–retailer system. This study presents a research scheme comprising: (1) model development for the mentioned internal supply-chain features; and (2) optimization approaches for determining the cycle time decision that minimizes the overall system operating expenses. To conclude our work, we validate the research scheme, procedure, and results through numerical demonstration and show that it can effectively support management’s decision-making with various exploratory and crucial information.

Facing current client expectations for high quality, timely order response, and multiple shipments of various needed merchandise, today’s producers must simultaneously satisfy external requirements and operate internally with minimum overall expenses and capacity constrained. Aiming to help present-day producers achieve the operational goals mentioned above, this work develops a decisional scheme to determine the best manufacturing-delivery policy for a multi-item economic production quantity (EPQ) system with multi-shipment, quality assurance, overtime, postponement, and external source. Combining a production postponement strategy in our multi-item batch fabricating procedures intends to first make all required standard/common parts for various client-needed merchandise and make finished goods in the 2nd phase. Two fabricating-uptime-shortening strategies are adopted: contracting out a proportion of the standard part’s batch and overtime-making of finished goods. We include screening and rework tasks in fabricating procedures to help us remove the identified scraps and correct the repairable faulty items. The quality-assured finished batches are divided into multiple equal-amount shipments transported to meet client requests. The overall manufacturing-transportation relevant expenses, including quality and uptime-expedited costs, are mathematically modeled and minimized using optimization methodology to help derive the best manufacturing-delivery operating policy. Moreover, we offer an illustration to validate the results and our research scheme’s capability numerically. This work mainly contributes to the literature by presenting a practical decision-making model. It enables the producers to expose numerous crucial problem-related managerial insights to facilitate producers in deciding the most appropriate manufacturing-delivery policy to meet clients’ multi-criteria demands.

This study aims to optimize a hybrid multi-item fabricating-shipping integrated system incorporating scrap, adjustable rate, and postponement. In present-day competitive market environments, there is a clear client demand trend for various goods, shorter lead time, and expected quality. To satisfy the client’s needs, the management of manufacturing firms requires an effective and efficient plan to fabricate various high-quality goods in an expedited period, under limited capacity, and with minimal operating expenses. Inspired by facilitating production management to determine the best fabricating scheme/plan to achieve their operational goals, this work proposes an exploratory postponement model with quality assurance and uptime reduction strategies for their decision-making. By employing a two-phase making scheme, the required standard components are first made in the 1st phase, and multiple finished merchandise is fabricated in the 2nd phase. The study suggests strategies of contracting out a part of the common parts’ batch and adopting an adjusted/expedited making rate in the 2nd phase to considerably reduce both phases’ production uptimes. During both fabricating processes, the screening tasks identify/remove scrapped/faulty goods to ensure each finished batch’s quality. Equal-amount multiple shipments of end merchandise are transported to the clients in fixed time-interval. Optimization methodology and mathematical analyses support us in deriving the model’s expected annual operating cost and deciding the optimal production-transportation policy. A numerical illustration helps verify our model’s applicability and reveals important managerial insights into the studied problem to facilitate management in decision-making.

The present research explores the collective influence of quality assurance and postponement on a hybrid multiproduct replenishing-delivery decision-making. Assume the required multiproduct has a standard (common) component, and our replenishing-delivery model has incorporated a two-phase postponement strategy. The first phase makes all standard components and hires an external supplier to partially provide the required parts to cut short the needed uptime. In contrast, the second phase fabricates the finished multiproduct in sequence. To ensure the desired merchandise quality, we apply a quality-assurance action to the in-house processes to screen and remove scrap items and rework the repairable defects in both stages. Upon completing each merchandise, these products are transported to the customer in n fixed-quantity shipment in fixed-time intervals. We employ math modeling and formulating approaches to gain the overall supply-chain operating expenses comprising subcontracting, fabricating, stock holding, transportation, and customer holding costs. By minimizing system operating expenses, this research determines the optimal replenishing-delivery policy. Lastly, we give a numerical example to demonstrate our study’s applicability and usefulness/capability for facilitating managerial decision-making.

Production management operating in recent competitive marketplaces must satisfy the client desired quality and shorter order lead-time and avoid internal fabricating disruption caused by inevitable defects and stochastic equipment failures. Achieving these operational tasks without undesirable quality goods, missing due dates, and fabrication interruption help the management minimize operating expenditures. Motivated by assisting manufacturing firms in the situations mentioned this study explores a manufacturing system that features quality reassurances through reworking or removal of defectives, correction of probabilistic failures, and partial overtime and outsourcing options for reducing uptime. This study finds the function of system operating expenditures through model building, mathematical formulations, optimization approaches, and algorithm proposition, shows its convexity, and derives the optimal batch time for the studied manufacturing model. Finally, this study offers numerical illustrations to confirm our work’s applicability and disclose its capability to provide various profound crucial system information that helps the management make strategic operating decisions.

Manufacturing firms operating in today’s competitive global markets must continuously find the appropriate manufacturing scheme and strategies to effectively meet customer needs for various types of quality of merchandise under the constraints of short order lead-time and limited in-house capacity. Inspired by the offering of a decision-making model to aid smooth manufacturers’ operations, this study builds an analytical model to expose the influence of the outsourcing of common parts, postponement policies, overtime options, and random scrapped items on the optimal replenishment decision and various crucial system performance indices of the multiproduct problem. A two-stage fabrication scheme is presented to handle the products’ commonality and the uptime-reduced strategies to satisfy the short amount of time before the due dates of customers’ orders. A screening process helps identify and remove faulty items to ensure the finished lot’s anticipated quality. Mathematical derivation assists us in finding the manufacturing relevant total cost function. The differential calculus helps optimize the cost function and determine the optimal stock-replenishing rotation cycle policy. Lastly, a simulated numerical illustration helps validate our research result’s applicability and demonstrate the model’s capability to disclose the crucial managerial insights and facilitate manufacturing-relevant decision making.

Production planners today must simultaneously face with the time and quality demands of various goods externally and meet limited capacity internally. This study presents a two-stage delayed- differentiation multiproduct model that considers the outsourcing options for common parts, overtime strategy for end products, and quality reassurance to assist in making fabrication runtime decisions that are cost-effective. Stage one produces all necessary common intermediate components for end products. To reduce stage one’s utilization/uptime, this study adopts a partial outsourcing option. Stage two uses an overtime strategy to fabricate end products that further shorten the uptime. The production processes in both phases are assumed to be imperfect. This study employs the reworking/scrapping of random faulty items to reassure product quality. The researchers build a model to depict the proposed problem’s characteristics and used the mathematical modeling, analysis, and optimization approach to determine the best rotation cycle length that minimizes the system’s expenses. Further, in this study, the researchers provide sensitivity analyses and a numerical illustration, which validate the result’s applicability and exhibit its capability. This result contributes to practical multiproduct-fabrication by (1) deriving the optimal manufacturing policy for a delayed-differentiation multiproduct system with dual uptime reduction policies and quality reassurance; and (2) offering a decisional model that allows production planners to explore the collective/separate effect of a quality-ensured and dual uptime reduction strategy on a problem’s operating policy and crucial system performance indicators, which assists in cost-effective decision-making.

This study develops a postponement model for the multi-item replenishment decision featuring commonality, an overtime strategy, and product quality reassurance. A single machine is used to meet the steady demand for multiple products wherein product commonality exists among these end products. The proposed postponement model assumes that all pertinent common parts are fabricated in Stage 1 and the finished products are sequentially fabricated in Stage 2. Random nonconformance rates are associated with both fabrication stages, the repairable nonconforming common parts are separated from scrap, and reworking in each cycle helps ensure product quality for each completed batch. An overtime strategy is used to reduce the lengthy fabrication and rework times for common parts. Mathematical analyses and derivation allow us to obtain the total system costs. The optimization method helps find the optimal replenishment decision. We provide a numerical illustration to show (1) how our model works; (2) the individual impact of the system features (e.g., the overtime factor, commonality in terms of the common part completion rate and its relative value, and the issues pertaining to scrap/rework) on the optimal decision, utilization, and the total system cost; and (3) the collective influence of system features on the highlighted problem. This proposed decision-support model helps production managers achieve the operating goals of lowering total system expenses and cutting the length of the production cycle.

Operating in today’s highly competitive global markets, transnational enterprises always seek to optimize internal vendor-buyer coordinated systems to ensure timeliness and quality deliveries, given the reality of unreliable machines and limited capacity. To facilitate accurate decision making to help organizations gain competitive advantages in such situations, this study explores an intra-supply-chain problem featuring a partial outsourcing batch fabrication plan, random scrap, Poisson-distributed breakdown rate, and multiple shipments of end-product. First, we build a model to characterize the problem clearly. Then, we carry out formulations, analyses, and derivations of the model to attain the problem’s cost function. We then use differential calculus and propose a specific algorithm to confirm the convexity of the obtained cost function and derive the optimal runtime. Finally, we offer a numerical illustration to demonstrate the result’s applicability for other business circumstances. Additional elements of the problem are then discussed, including the individual and combined influence of variations in scrap, outsourcing, breakdown, and shipping frequency. The features of an optimal operating policy and cost relevant parameters are now revealed to assist management with strategic planning and decision making in real-world intra-supply-chain environments.

With the intention of addressing product quality, machine reliability, and acceptable service level issues in real fabrication systems, this paper studies joint effects of stochastic breakdown, backorder of permissible shortage, rework, and scrap on the optimal stock replenishing policy. A decision model is developed to solve the problem, which consists of mathematical modeling, formulations, and optimization method in order to help analyze the problem, derive the system cost function, and find the optimal replenishment cycle length decision. Applicability of the research results are demonstrated by a numerical example. The proposed decision model enables production managers to not only determine the optimal stock replenishing policy, but also reveal individual impact and/or joint effects of stochastic breakdown, defective rate, backorder of allowable shortage, rework, and scrap on the replenishing decision. With such an in-depth study, diverse system characteristics become available for managerial decision-making.