Open Access

Felix Wimmert, Jan Hicking

• Single and small-series production companies face specific challenges, such as variable customer order decoupling points (CODP), decreasing quantities and rising cost pressure. This leads to a increasing production complexity and growing requirements on Production Planning and Control (PPC). Digitalization’s direct links between objects, people, and machines as well as detailed recording of production progresses opens new solutions for PPC. However, volume of data and the required processing times are increasing. Thus, to achieve near-real-time data processing, a decentralization of decision-making systems can be observed. The function Material Requirements Planning (MRP) is PPC’s original need for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Here, PPC’s overall problem (to fulfil primary requirements for products) is divided into subproblems (to fulfil single production orders). Especially companies characterized by an organization in accordance to the workshop principle, high in-house production depth and variable CODP are confronted with high dynamics in their production systems. This ends in significant differences between primary requirements (overall problem) and single production orders (subproblems). Ultimately, these insufficient PPC data result systematically in a non-optimal overall solution despite optimal partial solutions. This publication combines PPC’s fundamentals from existing commonly known models with current implementation concepts of ERP systems. A newly developed Low-Level-Code based Production Model provides explanations for deviations between the overall problem and its subproblems. Furthermore, information flows of PPC can be structured between a periodically actualized vertical and an event driven horizontal information flow. These recognitions lead to an improvement of PPC by ERP systems.