How to control a production system

By –Sashi .Prabhu
kanban control
A lean manufacturing system is one that meets high throughput with
little inventory. Despite its significant success, kanban control is not a
perfect mechanism to control a lean system. Kanban control uses the
levels of buffer inventories in the system to regulate production. When a
buffer reaches its preset maximum level, the upstream cell is told to stop
producing that part type.

This is often implemented by circulating cards, the kanbans, between a

machine/cell and the downstream buffer. The machine must have a card
before it can start an operation. It can then pick raw materials out of its
upstream (or input) buffer, perform the operation, attach the card to the
finished part, and put it in the downstream (or output) buffer. The
number of cards circulating determines the buffer size, since once all
cards are attached to parts in the buffer, no more parts can be made.
When the machine picks up raw materials to perform an operation, it
also detaches the card that was attached to the material. The card is
then circulated back upstream to signal the next upstream machine to
do another operation. This way, a demand for a unit of finished goods
percolates up the supply chain.

Kanban control. Movement of parts shown in blue, circulation of kanban in red.

Machines/cells are shown as circles and buffers as triangles. The last buffer is
the finished goods (FG) inventory.

Kanban control ensures that parts are not made except in response to a
demand. The analogy is to a supermarket: Only the goods that have
been sold are restocked on the shelves. However, it has a major
drawback: It uses the parts themselves as carriers of information. A
machine is told to stop production when its output buffer is full. This
requires that a number of parts sit in the buffer without serving any
apparent purpose but to block the upstream machine.
That's not quite right, though. The parts waiting in a buffer do serve a
purpose: They act as a buffer inventory, partially decoupling the
operation of downstream machines from any interruptions of upstream
production. If a machine fails, the machine downstream of it can
continue production by consuming the parts that are already in the
buffer. With luck, the upstream machine will be repaired before the
buffer is empty, and the failure will not affect the downstream machine
(or the customer on the downstream end of the chain).

But we can do this in a better way.

AGCONWIP(agile constant wip) control

AGCONWIP stands for AGILE Constant Work-In-Process, and
designates a control strategy that limits the total number of components
allowed into the system at the same time. Once the components are
released, they are processed as quickly as possible until they wind up in
the last buffer as finished goods. One way to view this is that the system
is enveloped in a single kanban cell: Once the internal customer
removes a part from the finished goods inventory, the first cell
in the chain is authorized to commence loading.

CONWIP control. Movement of parts shown in blue, circulation of release

authorizations in green.

This leads to subtly different behavior from a kanban control. First of all,
like kanban, the CONWIP system only responds to actual demands that
have occurred, so it is still a ``pull'' type system. But unlike kanban, the
resting state of the system has all buffers empty, except finished goods,
which is full. This occurs because any part released to the system will
move to finished goods. New parts will not be released if the finished
goods buffer is full. The inventory in finished goods is now available to
serve the customer, and there is no internal inventory on the shop floor
to collect dust.

But what about the buffer inventories and the decoupling against
failures? Something subtle called ``part/hole duality'' is happening. It is
true that inventory in a buffer protects the downstream portion of the line
against the consequences of failures upstream. But it does not protect
the upstream portion of the line against failures downstream. If a buffer
is full, and the machine downstream of it fails, a kanban line will stop
production upstream of the failure, no matter how many raging
customers line up at the end(internal & external). When the failed
machine is repaired, it will suddenly impose an increased workload on
the upstream portion of the system, since it needs to catch up with the
demand.

The mostly empty buffers in a CONWIP line contain valuable (but

cheap) empty space. This space is used to decouple the upstream
portion of the line against failures downstream. If the last machine in the
line fails, the customers will be served from the finished goods buffer,
while new parts will be released to the line as usual and proceed to the
buffer in front of the failed machine. There they wait for the repair. When
the machine is repaired, it has a sufficiently large number of parts in its
input buffer to catch up with demand and replenish the finished goods
buffer.

Empty buffer space acts to decouple the machines also in a kanban

line. But there, the control policy is to fill up the buffers whenever
possible. And this is possible most of the time, unless the demand rate
is greater than the system capacity.

Something remarkable just happened: We separated the flow of parts

and information. Then we got a control policy that allows the same
throughput and service levels as kanban, but at lower inventories.
Intuitively, the advantage over kanban will be larger for systems with
more stages (since there will be more internal buffers), and for systems
with more process variability (since that requires larger buffer
inventories to achieve the same throughput).

As an added bonus, the CONWIP control is even simpler to implement

than kanban, since just one set of cards is circulating.

But we can do even better than this.

Hybrid control
Sometimes, if the system is very heavily utilized or there is a bottleneck
in the line, the buffers towards the upstream end of a CONWIP line will
have quite high levels. On the other hand, kanban control was designed
to prevent individual buffer levels from exceeding designated limits.

Therefore, we construct a hybrid control policy where the CONWIP

control is supplemented with secondary kanban cells. These detect
problems in the line, and block release of parts to the line if they cannot
be processed further. We do not need a separate kanban cell to block
the last machine, since any material that has gotten this far surely will
reach the finished goods buffer if the machine can do an operation. The
resulting control policy acts mostly like CONWIP, but at decreased
inventories when trouble occurs.

Hybrid CONWIP/kanban control. Movement of parts shown in blue, circulation of

kanban in red, and release authorizations in green.

Note how similar this is to a kanban control: We circulate cards between

the machines and buffers. The sizes of the buffers are determined by
the number of cards in circulation. The only difference is that cards
detached from finished goods are passed to the first machine instead of
the last. From there, they follow the parts back to the finished goods
buffer.

How big is the improvement?

In our simulation studies, we have seen service improvements of more
than 40% (average backlog) combined with inventory decreases of
about 25%, compared with the best possible kanban control of the line.
This was a 10-machine line running at about 80% utilization, where the
parameters were chosen such that 75% of the demand was served from
stock in both cases. The advantage over kanban grows with the length
of the process, the degree of process variability, and the service level
target. The advantage of the hybrid policy over CONWIP grows with the
system utilization.