Event discrete bottleneck analysis with the order management bench: A tool for a fast and reliable order management design

Companies with multiple-variant series production are increasingly confronted with commercial pressures due to shorter product life cycles, greater product individualisation, and rapidly changing production technology. An important success factor for the enterprise centres around logistics performance, which is determined by the choice, design and the parameters of the order management methodology. Analytical considerations regarding the design and analysis of order management reach their limits in a turbulent environment. To overcome this situation, a tool called the 'Order Management Bench' (OMB) is proposed, to help anticipate the consequences of design decisions before implementation. Based on discrete event simulation, a number of building blocks have been developed that help modelling, simulating and analysing the logistic aspects of the order management process spanning the complete supply chain from customer order to the delivery of goods. The detection of bottlenecks of different types is a central requirement, when dealing with the analysis of as-is and to-be scenarios. In many cases, those bottlenecks affect the logistic goals only by means of a long event chains. Therefore, an approach is suggested, that scales down to the event level and generates bottleneck indicators from that information. Those bottlenecks indicators are called 'logistic opponents'.