ATP vs CTP policies in co-production context: the winner is not always the expected one.

Summary The impacts of using different order promising policies in traditional manufacturing industries are usually well known and documented in the literature. However, for industries facing divergent processes with co-production (i.e. several products simultaneously produced from a common raw material) as in the sawmilling industry, the evaluation, comparison, and selection of policies is not a trivial task. In this paper we compare different sawmilling industry order promising policies for various market conditions and demonstrate how and when these characteristics may call for Available-To-Promise (ATP), Capable-To-Promise (CTP), or other policies. It has been demonstrated that the best policy often differs from what would have been optimal in a classical manufacturing context (e.g. assembly).