Author name: Christian D. Ruf

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Optimizing inventory management

Does your company frequently fail to meet customer demand despite high inventory costs, and you wonder if you could do better? If your company lacks a well-designed decision-making process, the answer is “yes, you can certainly do better”! Inventory management is complex due to many interdependencies. Therefore, analytic models outperform gut feeling and rules-of-thumb in […]

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Excellent job shop scheduling does not require fancy tools

This post is about job shop scheduling (production scheduling in job shops). Job shops are factories that process jobs that require processing at multiple workstations, where the subset and order of workstations vary between jobs. The principle is illustrated in the figure below. Examples are the manufacturing of customized products like computer servers to customer

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Systems and methods for production scheduling

Does your production scheduling fall short of your expectations? You might be using the wrong scheduling system! Production scheduling is the final planning stage before the actual production, and the resulting production schedule suggests to operators and supervisors on the shop floor which tasks should be executed on which machines and in which order. Traditionally,

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Prescriptive analytics for supply chain network design

First published in May 2021 on SCDA Blog. One of the duties I frequently performed as an operations research analyst in consulting projects was optimizing companies’ supply chain network designs. A supply chain is a network that connects suppliers with customers to procure materials, transform them into final products, and deliver these products to customers. Supply

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