Process Planning for Aluminum Tubes: An Engineering-Operations Perspective

Anantaram Balakrishnan and Stuart Brown
Additional contact information
Anantaram Balakrishnan: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Stuart Brown: Failure Analysis Associates, Framingham, Massachusetts

Operations Research, 1996, vol. 44, issue 1, 7-20

Abstract: Metal-forming operations such as extrusion, drawing, and rolling offer many opportunities for operations improvement through better process understanding and improved planning practices. This paper addresses medium-term planning issues in aluminum tube manufacturing operations. First, we identify certain distinctive characteristics—the inherent process flexibility, close inter-dependence between successive stages, and economies of scale—of metal-forming operations, and identify performance trade-offs across stages. To exploit the strategic potential of process planning, it must be closely coupled with process engineering efforts, and must simultaneously consider the facility's entire product mix. In contrast, current process engineering efforts are mainly reactive, focusing on fixing problems at individual operations and with less emphasis on the interactions between successive stages. Similarly, planning activities are incremental, considering only individual products or orders one at a time rather than the entire range of product sizes to be manufactured. By working together, planners and engineers can develop effective process plans that exploit process capability, and adopt proactive process improvement strategies that focus on critical constraints. We describe a medium-term planning model to select standard extrusion sizes, illustrate the close linkages between planning and engineering activities, and identify research opportunities spanning management science, materials science, and mechanical engineering.

Keywords: engineering: process engineering; planning linkages; industries; mining/metals: process planning for metal forming operations; production/scheduling; planning: medium- and short-term planning models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.44.1.7 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:44:y:1996:i:1:p:7-20

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().