Title: Manufacturing planning and control in batch manufacturing industries: a multidimensional construct

Authors: B.S. Chetty, K.N. Krishnaswamy, B.V. Chowdary, K.B. Akhilesh

Addresses: Administrative Staff College of India, Raj Bhawan Road, Bella Vista, Hyderabad 500 082, India. ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India. ' Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, West Indies. ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India

Abstract: Manufacturing activity plays a major role in the industrial and economic development of a country. Effective planning and control of manufacturing is the key to performance of the manufacturing firms. The research question addressed in this paper is what factors of manufacturing planning and control (MPC) system discriminate the high MPC performers from the low MPC performers. In order to find out this, significant factors of MPC system have been extracted by performing multivariate analysis of data collected from batch manufacturing firms in India. Further, a parsimonious representation of MPC performance of these firms through factor analysis has been carried out. Through a discriminant analysis using the MPC system factors and MPC performance factors, the significant discriminating factors have been obtained. Finally, a few hypotheses have been formulated and tested to identify the significant factors that have to be addressed while designing the MPC system in batch manufacturing firms.

Keywords: manufacturing planning; manufacturing control; MPC systems; MPC performance variables; multivariate analysis; batch manufacturing; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2006.010989

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2006 Vol.27 No.1, pp.51 - 71

Published online: 26 Sep 2006 *

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