Abstract

Much of the success of an organization is focused on making decisions in its function of operations. Managing appropriately the resources that intervene in their processes of transformation, becomes a real challenge in order to increase effectiveness. For this, Optimization, based on the simulation of discrete events, appears as a tool with great potential in the productive or service systems, not only for the savings implied by their use in terms of time and cost, but also for its potential to minimize errors in making of decisions. In correspondence with the above, the present work set out to demonstrate (Objective) the strengths of these tools as support for decision-making, which optimize the assigment of men and machines in productive processes with a certain level of complexity and that guarantee the minimum total cost, the fulfillment of the production plans and a good performance of the system. FlexSim software was applied as simulator of discrete events, together with its Experfit and Experimenter tools. The IBM SPSS software was applied for other statistical analyzes. The results are presented with the application to a case study related to a company producing socks and belonging to the textile sector of Imbabura province, Ecuador. The men and machines assignment is made by each of the sections and subsections that make up the limiting point of the production process, adjusted to the amounts determined in the Master Production Schedule for each type of socks, ensuring minimal total cost and good performance of the principal metrics in that operation.

Keywords: Optimization; simulation of discrete events; resource allocation