Managing Flexible Capacity in a Make-to-Order Environment
研究按单生产环境下，灵活产能分配机制对系统绩效的影响，发现优先高利润产品或就近客户的做法会导致生产波动增大、运营成本上升，可能降低利润。
Flexible capacity has been shown to be very effective to hedge against forecast errors at the investment stage. In a make-to-order environment, this flexibility can also be used to hedge against variability in customer orders in the short term. For that purpose, production levels must be adjusted each period to match current demands, to give priority to the higher margin product, or to satisfy the closest customer. However, this will result in swings in production, inducing larger order variability at upstream suppliers and significantly higher component inventory levels at the manufacturer. Through a stylized two-plant, two-product capacitated manufacturing setting, we show that the performance of the system depends heavily on the allocation mechanism used to assign products to the available capacity. Although managers would be inclined to give priority to higher-margin products or to satisfy customers from their closest production site, these practices lead to greater swings in production, result in higher operational costs, and may reduce profits.