Abstract:

In the past, manufacturers produce products according to the vendor’s forecast. However, the vendor’s forecast is frequently higher than the actual customer’s demand so it caused numerous inventories. Therefore, manufacturers come to plan according to the actual customer’s demand to obtain the optimal quantity of inventory and use this consequence to negotiate with vendors to get both satisfaction results. This study therefore focuses on two topics: first topic is closed-loop logistics that discusses the flexibilities among production that might affect the quantity of products and inventory. A questionnaire was distributed to people who work in a Taiwanese company to obtain relevant data and test the level of importance of all flexibilities by K—W test and three different post-hoc tests so that the manufacturer is able to do production management and inventory management efficiently. Second topic is dynamic buffer management that is the actual application of planning based on the actual customer’s demand. To optimize the quantity of inventory kept and the buffer inventory set in dynamic buffer management, this research focuses on three cases including the increasing demand product, the decreasing demand product, and the fluctuation demand product to adjust different objects under the different conditions of life cycles and lead-times by particle swarm optimization.

Finally, we use simulation system to validate its effectiveness. The result of transformation model of the two-cluster tool with four blades including revisiting process shows that it is the same as the result of the original model of two-cluster tool with four blades including revisiting process by the simulation system in the 1-unit or 2-unit cycle.