An elaborate analysis of production systems in industry: what a consultant should know

It is common knowledge that during the last decade markets have become extremely competitive with product variety increasing continuously and product life cycles shortening. Many manufacturing companies, which hitherto satisfied their customers while operating specific production systems, were recently obliged to reconsider because of the potential superiority of other "manufacturing philosophies". In the literature, we meet a great variety of production systems and manufacturing philosophies, while, on the other side, in industry we usually find different combinations of "primary" productions systems. In this paper, we present the existing "state-of-the-art" theoretical and experiential knowledge about productions systems, as well as describe their basic characteristics in a useful, exact and comprehensive way for practitioners and software houses who want to have a knowledge base for further research and practical implementation in the wider field of production management, planning and scheduling.