Abstract:
Profitable performance of an industrial unit depends on
a rationale production system. The level of performance
depends solely on the production policy along with any other
relevant factors. Establishment of a clearcut relation
between the level of performance and cost of production as a
whole would require such considerations as,
i. Use~of mathematical tools and Scientific
methodology of Operations Research .(OR)
and statistics.
ii. Scientific approach of record keeping,
sorting, and retrieval of basic data etc.
The present research work is intended primarily to
explore the use of OR techniques and demonstrate their
application to an industrial unit through its different
stages of production decisions.
The work starts with an analysis of the production
system of the Mimi Chocolate Factory, with the aim to find
out idle time of both man and machine, the bottlenecks in
the production system.
Secondly, the work is concerned with the estimation of
demand of the products through the use of the historical
iv
sales data of past 24 months of consecutive periods. The
Winters' method of exponential smoothing was applied for the
purpose.
Thirdly, the work is concerned with the determination
of the optimal product-mix of the Mimi products. An LP model
was developed on the basis of plant capacity,availability of
man-hrs. and machine-hrs., ingredients and forecasted
demand.
Finally, an optimum procurement policy for some of the
major raw materials and ingredients of Mimi chocolate
factory was formulated on the basis of various cost elements
related to inventory. The Dynamic Programming technique was
applied to arrive at a solution to each of the ingredients
of the problem.
