Scheduling and inventory management are two important decision-making processes in any manufacturing industry. Scheduling is done with many objectives, like, aiming to minimize the makespan or minimizing the number of tardy jobs. Inventory management refers to the process of managing stocks of finished products, semi-finished products and raw materials by a firm so as to minimize the total inventory cost. Generally, these processes are treated as two different aspects in the decision-making process. This paper deals with the development of a Decision Support System (DSS) that integrates machine scheduling with inventory management for a multi-product manufacturing industry. The system was developed in three phases. The first phase involves the development of a scheduling system with makespan minimization as the primary objective. The second phase involves the development of the inventory management system and integrating it with the scheduling system. The third phase involves making the system web enabled, so that it provides the flexibility of distributed decision making to the decision makers.

In the rapidly changing market scenario, due to globalization manufacturers are under constant pressure to offer products at competitive prices to the customers. The aim of the decision makers in any industry is to reduce the manufacturing cost and deliver the product with minimum lead time to the customers. Material cost plays an important role in deciding the manufacturing cost and minimizing the makespan and help in reducing the lead time to deliver products to the customers. Scheduling and inventory management are the two important decision-making processes in the manufacturing industry that help managers in meeting these objectives. For this purpose, it is necessary to have a Decision Support System (DSS) which integrates machine scheduling and inventory management and helps the managers in making right decisions.

Scheduling is a decision-making process that deals with allocating of tasks, or jobs to resources over a time, for achieving certain objectives. The objectives may be minimization of makespan or minimizing maximum lateness/tardiness. One of the most popular models in scheduling theory is that of the job shop. Job shop scheduling is considered to be a good representation of the general domain and is known to be the most difficult to solve among Nondeterministic Polynomial (NP) hard set of scheduling problems.

Operations Management Journal, Web Integrated Decision Support System, Machine Scheduling, Inventory Management, DSS, Nondeterministic Polynomial, Inventory Management, Visual Basic, VB, Java Server Pages, JSP, Genetic Algorithm.