Development and performance evaluation of "heijunka" production and inventory control system in supply chain management

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Kanban system has been known to be a superior tool to control complex production and inventory systems based on “heijunka”. The heijunka means smoothing the production order and part replenishment quantities. In this research, heijunka methods to control a complex multi-stage multi-product production and inventory system are investigated. This research reviews past researches of production planning and control systems concerned with production smoothing. Next the research develops a heijunka production and inventory control system, presents an efficient algorithm to optimize the system, and then evaluates the performance of the production order system based on heijunka in a supply chain as compared to the original kanban and MRP systems. It is concluded that the locally optimized production smoothing order system is quite effective as production and inventory control system in the supply chain.