Evaluation of postponement in manufacturing systems with non-negligible changeover times

This article aims to examine the cost or benefit implications of employing postponement in the manufacturing environments characterised by non-negligible changeover times incurred when switching production from one product to another. Four manufacturing configurations are distinguished based on the choice of manufacturing technology and on whether or not postponement is employed. Analytical evaluation methods based on queuing models are used to assess operational measures for each configuration and solution algorithms are developed to determine the optimal decisions that may include stocking level, batch size and differentiation point. A numerical experiment is carried out to identify how the system performance is affected by different parameters.