Kanban Supply Chain Management

Kanban is an approach to provide an effective relation between different components of a Supply Chain System, such as suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, distribution centers, retailers and finally customers. Instead of pushing parts, in kanban system each proceeding plant(s) sends a signal to the preceding plant(s) for needed parts to be sent. The plants only produce and deliver desired parts when they receive a signal. Number of kanbans can significantly influence the load balance between processes and the amount of orders suppliers need to obtain from subcontractors. A large kanban size results in large amount of work-in-process(WIP) at each workstation. Although, reducing kanban size serves a decrease in WIP, it leads to transportation increase as well as system throughput rate reduction. In this study a multi-echelon supply chain system is considered. Since the model used in this study is mixed integer non-linear programming and solving by exact algorithms such as branch and bound takes lots of time specially when the scale increases, a heuristic method via Genetic Algorithm(GA) is presented and some problems are solved using the proposed GA to illustrate its performance.

Autorentext

Holds bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from Sharif University of Technology,Iran, and master's degree also in Industrial Engineering from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia(UTM). His research interests include logistics and Supply Chain Management, Lean Manufacturing, Information systems, Optimization, System Modelling and Simulation.