Principles of lean planning and control

Lean production systems use teams instead of functional departments as well as simple shop floor control methods to manage the flow of orders at the shop floor. Lean shop floor control focuses on robust and visual methods that are able to cope with variation in processing times, routing sequences, disturbances, resource allocation, et cetera. Although the main focus of lean will be to eliminate unnecessary variation that causes waste, unreasonableness, and unevenness, there will be variation that directly relates to providing customer value and hence needs to be accommodated in the control system. This paper investigates what fundamental principles are behind lean planning and control methods. We describe underlying principles that have been developed even before computerized methods such as Material Requirements Planning and Input/Output control became popular. Next we review some recent developments in the use of lean planning and control methods, such as Polca, (M-) Conwip, and Cobacabana.