The Paradigm of Pit - Stop Manufacturing

Abstract

The context in which manufacturing companies are operating is more and more dynamic. Technological and digital innovations are continuously pushing manufacturing systems to change and adapt to new conditions. Therefore, traditional planning strategies tend to be inadequate because both the context and short - term targets are continuously changing. Indeed, one of the goals of manufacturing companies is to keep manufacturing systems efficiently running, and reduce and control the impact of disruptive events, that may originate from different sources, not always known or well defined. In order to do so, manufacturing systems should be kept relatively close to the current optimal condition, while, at the same time, taking into account information about future possible events, which may require new optimal conditions. In fact, the reaction time to the change must be short, in order to remain competitive in the market. In addition companies to be competitive should lead the introduction of changes therefore they have to be both reactive and proactive. From this analysis, the new paradigm of ‘pit - stop manufacturing’ is introduced, in which the overall goal is to dynamically keep the manufacturing system close to an improvement trajectory, instead of statically optimizing the system. It is shown how the ‘pit - stop manufacturing’ deals with various aspects of current manufacturing systems, therefore providing novel research questions and challenges.