## 5 Decision Support Workflow
### Scope Setting: Determination of the Main Factors Influencing CDD  
Delivery performance is usually measured in two ways: (1) there is a customer demanded delivery date, called the requested delivery date (RDD), and (2) there is the CDD, the committed delivery date, given by the manufacturer to the customer. What really matters is conformance with the latter.  
During a broad-sweeping, deep, and systematic analysis, we have identified and categorized all the main factors which are influencing the CDD delivery performance of our HMLV plant. The main categories are: (1) raw materials' inventory level, (2) suppliers' capability, (3) manufacturing capability, (4) logistics, (5) products' complexity, and (6) quality of planning (see also Figure 7). A detailed description of these factors is as follows:  
1. Raw material inventory level: Raw material and subassembly availability define when production can be launched as early as possible. Increasing the raw material inventory level will certainly improve the delivery performance. However, with increasing the inventory level, the cost of capital will increase as well, and the overall profitability of a plant may decrease. A tradeoff between inventory (cost of capital) and CDD must be achieved on a plant level.
2. Suppliers' capability: Performance of suppliers is defined by several criteria, such as minimum order quantity (MOQ), quality of the delivered parts, delivery lead time, payment conditions, transportation cost, tooling cost and ownership, flexibility, and speed in reacting to the orders. Minimizing the number of suppliers can lead to high dependency with consequences that can carry high risks in the future.
3. Manufacturing capability: In our case, manufacturing includes machining and assembly operations (manual, semiautomatic, and automatic). Manufacturing capabilities are impacted by the machines' technical capability (age and condition), reliability, quality and efficiency of maintenance, level of total productive maintenance (TPM), and flexibility. Interchangeability of machines and equipment matters in case of breakdowns, and further important factors are skills of machine operators, programming capabilities of engineers and technicians, change over speed from one order to the other, utilization of machines, and the potential for upgrading existing machines or replacing them with a newer technology.
4. Logistics: Here, we make distinction between external and internal logistics. External logistics is mainly related to transportation: the incoming and outgoing flow of materials. In internal logistics, the key factors are the processing of incoming materials (counting, quality checking, customs clearance, putting the parts on the shelf, just-in-time processing), raw or semi-finished material transportation to the manufacturing point (including Kanban box changes), and finished goods' transportation from the machining/assembly area to the finished goods warehouse.  
Figure 6: The basic decision support workflow.  
Products' complexity: In case of standard products, processes can be shorter and more predictable. When there are configurated and customized products, the delivery performance can differ significantly, even in cases when products are quite similar.
6. Quality of sales, production, and supply planning: CDD depends very much on the quality of planning. Several factors determine the efficiency of planning: historical forecasting, lot-sizing, and scheduling policies, prioritization, skills of the planner, and reliability of available information coming from suppliers or production engineering.