Agility, speed and flexibility in production networks are required in today's global competition in the flat world. The accuracy of order date delivery promises is a key element in customer satisfaction. Agile production needs a management and evaluation tool for production changes. Discrete event simulation, DES, has mainly been used as a production system analysis tool, to evaluate new production system concepts, layout and control logic. DES can be used for operational planning as well, as

more »

... own in the paper. The simulation analysis gives a forecast of the future with given input values, thus production managers have time to react to potential problems and evaluate alternatives. A balance between multiple parallel customer orders and finite resources can be found. The authors are developing a system design evaluation method and also a decision support system for production managers. Two case studies with different approaches are described in the paper.