Manufacturing lead time estimation using data mining techniques

Due to the global competition environment, manufacturing firms bound to compete for issues such as quality, cost, delivery, and flexibility. In manufacturing process make-to-order production is preferred instead of making stocks. This yields low cost and flexibility however brings with acurate estimation of lead time. Giving short lead times gains customers however brings with the time delays. When long lead times is given, completion of the delivery will be easy but on the other hand customer tends to go the firm which gives short lead times.Accordance with the developing technology, due to the cheaper computer systems, increasing capacity, automation in the manufacturing environment facilitates to get manufacturing data. This situation brings with the requirement of extracting meaningful knowledge from that data.Data mining can be defined as extracting meaningful knowledge from large databases. The purpose of this thesis is estimating lead time using data mining techniques. For this purpose in the first section the data mining techniques, in the second section lead time and lead time estimation methods are investigated. In the third section manufacturing process of water meters is examined and in the light of the given data the lead time of machines is estimated by using data mining techniques.Keywords: Data Mining, Lead Time, Decision Trees