Don’t miss Dr. Mark Spearman from Physics Factory as he shares the “Laws” of how production-inventory systems behave. For more information, download Dr. Spearman’s abstract and biography.
As always refreshments are available in 428 Daniels Hall 30 minutes before the seminar begins.
The text Factory Physics provides a set of “Laws” that are essentially general observations about how production-inventory systems behave. Such a set of observations is at the most elemental level of physics. A more fundamental level would be a general framework that would predict these observations. One of the key “laws” in FP states, “Variability will be buffered by some combination of inventory, time, and capacity.” This talk provides the beginnings of an underlying theory for this law along with some insights as well. For instance, the presence of randomness naturally results in a Brownian motion model, a model that has been used successfully to model supply chains for many years. The formalism also results in something akin to the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle” of quantum mechanics only this one relates the variability in production and the variability in net inventory.
From a pedagogical perspective, the formalism provides an intuitive way to “derive” queueing relations using a few stylized pictures of variability and a little algebra. Such a “derivation” might be useful when teaching students without much training in mathematics.
Mark L. Spearman is President of Factory Physics, Inc., a firm that provides management consulting, training, and software to improve manufacturing and supply chain management. In his former life as an academic, he was associate
professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University and in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, and professor of Industrial Engineering and Head at Texas A&M University. Spearman is coauthor, with Wallace J. Hopp, of the book, Factory Physics that was
named the IIE Book of the Year.
