Integration of TOC and ERP in Production Planning

The manufacture of high-quality products at comparatively low-cost has gradually become the mainstream. Our study arranges the production planning by integrating the bottleneck-breaking concept of theory of constraints (TOC) and the enterprise resources planning (ERP). We use it to provide timely and relevant information on resource and production progress, which is a critical issue for the production planning. Through analyzing the manufacturing characteristics, we further integrate the drum-buffer-rope (DBR) method to synchronize production to the constraint to achieve the following objects: First, the company can easily identify the bottleneck and allocate its valuable resources to the bottleneck. Second, in process management, the company can set the pace of other operation activities according to the drum of the bottleneck with the assistance of continuous information feed. Third, the proposed method is capable to improve the production performance in terms of cycle time and capacity utilization. A practical case is presented to demonstrate how TOC and ERP can effectively integrated and implemented for production planning.