The concepts of APICS were founded on the principles of discrete manufacturing. In discrete manufacturing, many parts are assembled into a product, physically imploding a bill of materials (BOM). In the process industry, however, a few raw materials result in many products (i.e., exploding the BOM). Fundamentally, some process industry plants are scheduled quite differently from their counterparts in discrete manufacturing just because of this difference. There are four topics that have particular relevance to the process industry and highlight a high degree of complexity that schedulers within this industry must manage: ASAP and Justin-Time (JIT) scheduling, shelf life, matching product classifications, and commodity and specialty business models. Management of these issues would be greatly facilitated if scheduling software targeting the process industry included specific functionality that took these challenges into account.
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