IoT-enabled manufacturing synchronization for ecommerce

Ecommerce has been an efficient way for manufacturing enterprises to receive customer orders. One typical characteristics of Ecommerce production orders is that they usually require several different types of products. Synchronous production of different products for one customer orders, referred to synchronization in this paper, plays a critical role in lowering inventory level and meeting customer delivery demand. To facilitate the synchronization, an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) system is developed by using the Physical Internet (PI) technology. Several innovations are significant. Firstly, execution-level activities are integrated with planning and scheduling decisions through PI to support real-time data collection for synchronization. Secondly, the production progresses of products and customer orders are monitored real-timely and fully considered in scheduling. Thirdly, scheduling is conducted by the joint efforts of schedulers and workshop supervisors to further guarantee the synchronization.