Prof Olufemi Adetunji, Head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the University of Pretoria (UP)’s Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, delivered his inaugural address on 11 September 2024. The title of his presentation was: “The future of the manufacturing planning and control system and the sensor of the intangibles”.

Prof Adetunji joined the University of Pretoria as a full-time lecturer in 2007. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 2012 and associate professor in 2021. He took over as Head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in January 2024. His research focus areas include operations management, supply chain management, operations research, artificial intelligence and enterprise systems. He is a C-rated researcher with the National Research Foundation (NRF).

During his inaugural address, he explained that manufacturing planning and control is at the heart of production systems. It reconciles customer demand with the requirements for production resources (inventory and capacity) and guides the necessary trade-off decisions, guided by an appropriate production management philosophy.

He traced the evolution of industrial engineering, starting from basic productivity engineering after the First Industrial Revolution. This includes the work of researchers like Frederick Winslow Taylor and his engineering techniques to improve industrial efficiency; efficiency experts Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, who contributed to work in the areas of motion study and human factors; and George Elton Mayo’s work on the Hawthorne effect, which is related to productivity, where people change their behaviour when they are aware that they are being observed.

He states that a great technology does not always translate to great prosperity: it is trade and not technology, per se, that creates wealth. Technology supports trade for national prosperity. He illustrates this by citing the Japanese case of lean movement, which is aimed at maximising customer value through the elimination of waste. This new way of thinking opened up new possibilities in manufacturing. It did not represent a new technology, but a new perspective. “Changing one’s way of thinking can have a significant impact and deliver results never envisaged before,” he says.

Many new fields in industrial engineering have evolved over recent years, including manufacturing planning and control, and enterprise resource planning. Some prominent subdisciplines have resulted from a growth in research and expanded skills sets. These include integrated enterprise and supply chain systems, and intelligent enterprise systems. The evolution of operations research techniques, including those of inventory, scheduling and forecasting, have also spurred the growth. However, there is a continued search for philosophies or manufacturing planning and control techniques to harmonise the different disciplines within the field. He illustrated this by discussing the transformation framework, which explains the relationship between input and output. This is related to the production planning and control framework, with its short-, medium- and long-term objectives.

Prof Adetunji went on to discuss the role of industrial engineering in the competitiveness of nations and the concept of a work system as the operating environment of industrial engineering. The work system is more than just an arrangement of machines. In this regard, he referred to the five Ms: man, machine, material, method and money. The human being is an important component of the work system. Man and machines are only part of the resources, as the benefit of the machine is not realised by its independent use. What is important is the optimisation of resources.

He distinguished between optimisation and automation, clarifying automation to be about using machines (or even software) to do work that humans would have normally been needed for. Optimisation, he explained, is the process of making the “best” choice out of many possible alternatives. He discussed how many companies have usually paid attention to automation, and largely ignored optimisation, and propounded reasons why optimisation has probably received less attention than it deserved, and how this leads to the problem of “spreadsheet hell” in industry applications. He motivated the need to find a convergence for optimisation and automation as this can birth new planning systems that can continually help organisations to make big cost-saving decisions.

He presented inventory management within the manufacturing planning and control framework, and used it to illustrate optimisation. He reviewed inventory models for deteriorating, ameliorating, substitutable, growing and recoverable inventory items as his main research field. He then highlighted some applications of these inventory areas, like food chains and circular manufacturing. He also presented some of the softer issues of production management philosophies and his research in understanding how these affect the efficiency of work systems. He focused, particularly, on structural equation modelling to illustrate its applications in the non-mechanistic side of the system.

Looking at the future of manufacturing planning and control, he anticipated how it will evolve based on artificial intelligence and the Industrial Internet of Things. This model comprises five levels: the field level (the physical production process), the control level (sensing and manipulating the production process), the supervisory level (monitoring and supervising), the planning level (manufacturing operations planning) and the management level (business and logistics). The planning level is the least understood level, and relates to the manufacturing execution system leveraging the Industrial Internet of Things. He believes that this level holds enormous opportunities. This is the digital realisation of the manufacturing planning and control system, and is the future direction of research in industrial engineering.

Prof Adetunji concluded his address by presenting the idea of the sensor of the intangibles. He explained how this may influence the design of an intelligent manufacturing execution system, as an element of the manufacturing operations planning layer of the future Industrial Internet of Things. Sensors of the intangibles may integrate economic and human factors in the future intelligent manufacturing execution system architecture and deliver the continuous optimisation of operations through soft automation processes.