Scheduling and due-date quotation in a make-to-order supply chain

Abstract

We consider a manufacturer, served by a single supplier, who has to quote due dates to arriving customers in a maketo-order production environment. The manufacturer is penalized for long lead times and for missing due dates. To meet due dates, the manufacturer has to obtain components from a supplier. We model this manufacturer and supplier as a two-machine flow shop, consider several variations of this problem, and design effective due-date quotation and scheduling algorithms for centralized and decentralized versions of the model. We perform extensive computational testing to assess the effectiveness of our algorithms and to compare the centralized and decentralized models to quantify the value of centralized control in a make-to-order supply chain. Since complete information exchange and centralized control is not always practical or cost-effective, we explore the value of partial information exchange for this system.