Order fulfillment in high variety production environments

Providing high levels of product variety and product customization is challenging for many companies. This paper presents a new classification of production and order fulfillment approaches available to manufacturing companies that offer high variety and/or product customization. Six categories of approaches are identified and described. An important emerging approach - open pipeline planning – is highlighted for high variety manufacturing environments. It allows a customer order to be fulfilled from anywhere in the system, enabling greater responsiveness in Build-to-Forecast systems. The links between the open pipeline approach, decoupling concepts and postponement strategies are discussed and the relevance of the approach to the volume automotive sector is highlighted. Results from a simulation study are presented illustrating the potential benefits when products can be reconfigured in an open pipeline system. The application of open pipeline concepts to different manufacturing domains is discussed and the operating characteristics of most relevance are highlighted. In addition to the automotive, sectors such as machinery and instrumentation, computer servers, telecommunications and electronic equipment may benefit from an open pipeline planning approach. When properly designed these systems can significantly enhance order fulfillment performance.

Electronic Publishing -- a Journal and its Production

The use of the term "Electronic Publishing" transcends any notions of the paperless office and of a purely electronic transfer and dissemination of information over networks. It now encompasses all computer-assisted methods for the production of documents and includes the imaging of a document on paper as one of the options to be provided by an integrated processing scheme. Electronic publishing draws heavily on techniques from computer science and information technology but technical, legal, financial and organisational problems have to be overcome before it can replace traditional publication mechanisms. These problems are illustrated with reference to the publication arrangements for the journal `Electronic Publishing Origination, Dissemination and Design'. The authors of this paper are the co-editors of this journal, which appears in traditional form and relies on a wide variety of support from electronic technologies in the pre-publication phase.

In-house Preparation of Examination Papers using troff, tbl, and eqn.

Starting in December 1982 the University of Nottingham decided to phototypeset almost all of its examination papers `in house' using the troff, tbl and eqn programs running under UNIX. This tutorial lecture highlights the features of the three programs with particular reference to their strengths and weaknesses in a production environment. The following issues are particularly addressed: Standards -- all three software packages require the embedding of commands and the invocation of pre-written macros, rather than `what you see is what you get'. This can help to enforce standards, in the absence of traditional compositor skills. Hardware and Software -- the requirements are analysed for an inexpensive preview facility and a low-level interface to the phototypesetter. Mathematical and Technical papers -- the fine-tuning of eqn to impose a standard house style. Staff skills and training -- systems of this kind do not require the operators to have had previous experience of phototypesetting. Of much greater importance is willingness and flexibility in learning how to use computer systems.