Supply Chain Management For Dummies

Chapter 8

Making Your Products or Services

IN THIS CHAPTER

Deciding what to make, how much to make, and when to make it

Selecting the right manufacturing processes for your supply chain

Improving quality and reducing waste

Every business makes something — a product or a service — and every product or service has a supply chain. This chapter describes how the steps you follow to make anything can be broken down into a handful of subprocesses so that you can measure and manage them effectively. In terms of a process framework such as Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR; see Chapter 5), Make refers to the group of processes that transform components into a new product or service that has value for a customer. The job of overseeing these processes is often called operations management.

This chapter explains how to design your operations so that you make the right number of products at the right time. First, you’ll look at planning a production schedule. Then you’ll examine the two main environments for making products: discrete manufacturing, in which items are made individually or in batches, and continuous manufacturing, where items are made in a stream. After that, you’ll consider ...