CAST STUDY LAFARGE

Cast study Lafarge

Cast study Lafarge

A

With more than 200 production sites, activities in 45 countries and about 11,680 employees, Lafarge Roofing, the roofing division of building materials giant Lafarge Group(www.lafarge.com), has a lot to gain from facilitating good practice and knowledge transfers around the world. To this end, the company has restructured its internal knowledge-sharing processes over the past three years, which are now better adapted to its business processes.

This restructuring has seen knowledge management (KM), in conjunction with the company's central technical centre, take on the task of supporting the worldwide production network, which added 66 new locations between 1998 and 2005 alone. Standardisation of industrial processes, performance improvement and workplace safety have all benefited as a result, from the systematic exchange of information and good practice, training courses and accompanying communications initiatives.

B

Production planning is usually done at an aggregate level, for both products and resources. Distinct but similar products are combined into aggregate product families that can be planned together so as to reduce planning complexity. Similarly production resources, such as distinct machines or labor pools, are aggregated into an aggregate machine or labor resource. Care is required when specifying these aggregates to assure that the resulting aggregate plan can be reasonably disaggregated into feasible production schedules. Finally for complex products, one must decide the level and extent of the product structure to include in the planning process. For instance, in some contexts it is sufficient to just plan the production of end items; the production plan for components and subassemblies is subservient to the master production schedule for end items. In other contexts, planning just the end items is sub-optimal, as there are critical resource constraints applicable to multiple levels of the product structure. In this instance, a multistage planning model allows for the simultaneous planning of end items and components or subassemblies. Of course, this produces a much larger model. 

C

Inputs

The ...