Customer order scheduling problem for the box packaging industry: An application

Today, companies face increasingly competetitive situations. Every single day, customer needs and expectation levels are rising. Customers wish to buy high quality goods with appropriate prices from suppliers that have satisfactory customer service. To reach these requests that conflict each other, companies have been pushed towards planning and controlling their activities better. Goods which are produced by companies can be of a single type or various types according to customer requests. For companies that have order-based production, accepting close deadlines for orders is important to compete with others. This is the reason why processes related to taking orders, managing orders and producing them according to delivery dates must be managed effectively. While managing customer orders, production capacity, production and inventory systems, and harmony of between them are very important. In this thesis, scheduling of customer orders for a box packaging production company that produces order-based products is taken into consideration. This study aims to create an algorithm to support the decision maker by making efficient schedules. In this algorithm, assigning the orders to days and sequencing the orders during the days have been solved in two stages, and in each stage integer programming models have been used. The model created in the first stage minimizes the weighted tardiness of the orders, and at the same time aims to use the machine capacities efficiently. Here, the weights used in calculating the tardiness are determined by the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, based on the knowledge and experience of experts. In the second model, the change in the mold and the destination location of the products produced successively are minimized and the orders of the customers that are distant from the company are given priority. Augmented epsilon constraint method was used to obtain different efficient solutions in alternative priorities. In the real life application carried out in the box packaging production company, the results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the current application results of the factory. The results show that the proposed algorithm has superior performance. Keywords: Scheduling, customer order scheduling, integer programming, AHP, epsilon constraint method