Designing production planning and control in smart manufacturing

To make manufacturing technology productive, manufacturers rely on a production planning and control (PPC) framework that plans ahead and monitors ongoing transformation processes. The design of an appropriate framework has far-reaching implications for the manufacturing organization as a whole. Yet, to date, there has been no unified guidance on key PPC design issues. This is strongly needed, as it has been argued that novel information processing technologies – as part of Industry 4.0 – result in PPC frameworks with decentral structures. This conflicts with traditional works arguing for hierarchical or central structures. Therefore, we review the PPC design literature to create a comprehensive overview and summarize design proposals. Based on our review, we come to the intermediate conclusion that PPC frameworks continue to have a hierarchical structure, although decision-making is shifted more to decentral levels compared to traditional hierarchies. Our analysis suggests that the effect of a decentralization shift has potentially strong and poorly understood implications, both from a decision-making and organizational perspective.