Description

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A central and unresolved issue in modern manufacturing remains the economics of speed. This thesis addresses this issue by critically examining the introduction of the just-in-time concept in the chemical-pharmaceutical industry. To this end, it develops a framework for assessing the impact of JIT and then applies it to an actual case in the industry. This framework consists of two complementary methods: ProfiSEE - a novel and successful workbench for visual interactive simulation modeling, and QED - a rough-cut financial model. The outstanding feature of QED is that it translates common measures of speed into measures of financial performance such as ROA. A comparative analysis of a classical capacity-oriented operation and its JIT counterpart provides important insights into the impact of managerial decisions and external factors on these measures of business performance. We learn why manufacturing strategies should focus on speed and time-based criteria.

About the Author

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The Author: Willem Vaessen was born and raised in The Netherlands. He moved to Canada in 1973 to obtain B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of British Columbia. In 1984, he joined the Swiss-based multinational CIBA-GEIGY AG. For this publication, he received a doctorate in business economics from the university of Basel. During the time he carried out his research, the author was a consultant in the central Operations Research department. He contributed to various productivity improvement and facility design projects in production, a major inventory and distribution policy study, as well as the development of a comprehensive set of supply chain performance measurements, as part of a company-wide MRP II project. Willem Vaessen was also responsible for the development of ProfiSEE. Recently, he joined Technical Operations of the pharmaceutical division.