Abstract
Order Review/Release (ORR) System is the linkage between planning system and actual production. Reduction of the waiting time on the machines, work in process and lead time variation may be achieved by adopting ORR strategies. But researchers on the ORR do not agree on the effectiveness of ORR. Some say that the overall system flow time may be increased if ORR is adopted, but others say that ORR can reduce work in process, flow time and variation of flow time. The objective of this research is to clarify under what environments order release strategy is effective. Simulation study was conducted in a hypothetical job shop. The experimental results show that dispatching rule is much more important than ORR is in controlling the shop floor. But the results indicate that ORR can reduce mean shop flow time, average work in process and variation of shop flow time under such environments where utilization level is high and planned order is weekly released to the order pool. And the results also show that the effect of plan smoothing on the ORR is insignificant, which is inconsistent with the results of the previous researches.
