Gerald Reiner, University of Neuchatel
Abstract:
It is commonly accepted that variability is one of the main challenges in designing and managing supply processes. Many process improvement concepts that focus primarily on communication and information exchange, flow time reduction, etc., finally influence variability. In particular, they reduce variability or mitigate the operational effects of variability. The effect on selected performance measures is mostly shown by idealized quantitative models, but there are only few results from real-world processes. The presented analyses of real supply processes are based on open queuing networks and systems dynamics models.