Improving the tactical planning process to stabilize the workload

In my study, I will try to improve the planning process of Voortman Steel Machinery (VSM), aiming to stabilize the workload of the Voortman Parts Manufacturing (VPM 2) department. As a part of Voortman Steel Group, VSM is specialized in the manufacturing of CNC-controlled machinery for steel fabrication. Developing and producing these advanced CNC-controlled machines is not an easy process. Therefore, a good planning process is essential. Currently, the planning of the VPM departments is unstable due to the high variability in the workload per production order and because VSM wants to guarantee short delivery times to their customers. Since this instability in the planning causes several problems within the VPM departments, VSM asked me to investigate how the workload of the VPM 2 department can be stabilized. I investigate this by first analyzing the current work/ planning process. Next, I perform a literature review after which I investigate what the parameters and variables are within the planning. Use these parameters and variables I create a model and some heuristics that can be used to create a plan. After an analysis of the results of the model and heuristics and based on the results of several experiments, we select a heuristic and advise VSM to use this heuristic to create their plan.