A Dynamic System of Material Flows in Wood lndustry Companies

The plan is the strategy for action. Planning involves choosing a plan by considering alternative plans and reasoning about their consequences. The correct planning will result in a higher system of efficiency. To enable the planning the following resources have to be available: material, staff, money, facilities, information and time. Unreliable suppliers force manufacturers to buy and to store materials to ensure the appropriate stocks. The consequence of such a policy results in increased expenses and a big turnover of the investment capital. The purpose of an inventory is security. Therefore, the managing with the material flows must establish the product quantities when other sources are not sufficient. The paper presents the modelling-learning simulation that can help a decision maker to optimize the inventories in a small wood industry company. The research resulted in a model that simulates material flows in a way of intelligent decision support. The model includes a manufacturer, suppliers and mathematical methods that provide inventory simulation. The simulation has been based on data collected from a wood industry company. The simulation results have been compared with the data from a real system. The comparison shows that the modelling-learning approach in combination with system dynamics could yield better results than the other methods do. When the stocks are lower the invested turnover capital is lower too. The model that has been developed could be successfully applied in wood industry companies. This enables intelligent decision support that will result in profitable business.