Integration of process planning and production management

New markets’ demand objectives call for the integration of process planning in production management, which means that the process plan must be regarded as a variable, to be generated within seconds and with no human intervention. The matrix method, aims at introducing flexibility by integrating process planning and production management. The routing is presented by an Operation-Resources Matrix, which represents many possible routing, However, the selection of the routing is deferred to the moment of need. The method does a Material Requirements Planning (finite capacity) and Capacity Planning in one run, keeping the product network (Bill of Material) at all times. In this paper the concept of the matrix method is described.