Production Planning through Lean Manufacturing and Mixed Integer Linear Programming

Production planning is one of the most important administrative decisions a company can make, as it involves achieving the lead times set by the customers while taking advantage of the resources the organization has. Over time, different strategies using mathematical models have been implemented in production planning, aimed at finding the best solution for optimizing the available resources. In recent years companies throughout the world have successfully implemented Lean Manufacturing, aimed at improving their production processes and eliminating everything that does not add value to the product. This article exemplifies a new strategy for production planning, using basic concepts from Lean Manufacturing and mixed integer linear programming models by stages. We took a women's footwear factory in the city of León, Guanajuato, México, as a case study. The results show that it is possible to get planning that optimizes the organization's resources and shortens the products' lead times by shrinking inventories, from a Lean Manufacturing perspective.