Integrated Production Attending to Supply Chain, Materials Handling and Storage Requirements

The recent appear of new technologies in product identification along the supply chain, gives foot to a new way of addressing old integration problems in the implementation of models and systems. Research in new identification technologies comes hand in hand with the one being carried out towards a better integration between manufacturing and distribution. This last integration is being done by the use of optimization models for plant configurations, which takes into account operational and structural aspects of such systems in a manufacturing environment. This paper deals with some of the problems that appear in product identification along the production/supply chain as well as some of the techniques that are being used to tackle them. A new approach for facing different aspects of production, storage and distribution planning is discussed, and a feasible model is presented.