Solving Production Smoothing Problems

This paper analyzes the problem of balancing resource capacity utilization against the costs of user delay or inventory investment. Instead of formulating algorithms to solve more classical versions of the problem, this paper describes ways that organisations can drop the cost curve prior to applying an optimizing algorithm. This is done by classifying the techniques and giving examples from organizations which have faced serious smoothing problems. Other organizations can improve their cost performance by adopting some of these techniques.