A Comparison of Production Time Calculation Methods for Customized Products Manufacturing

One of the most important challenge for manufacturers of customized products is calculation of the production time. Choosing the right method of that calculation is the key of correct determining production plans and delivery dates for customers. The reason is, among other issues, the lack of real data on standard times required to complete individual manufacturing operations or processes. This article presents comparison of most common production time estimating methods, known from the literature: knowledge-based estimation, predictive analytics and statistical learning methods. These methods were adopted for the simulated production process and compared in terms of the accuracy of the calculated times, compared to the real times achieved by the research groups in the simulation.