Reference: Onyeocha, C. E., and Geraghty, J., "A Modification of the Hybrid Kanban-CONWIP Production Control Strategy for Multi-Product Manufacturing Systems", “IMC29” International Manufacturing Conference proceedings, August 2012, University of Ulster, Belfast, UK. A MODIFICATION OF THE HYBRID KANBAN-CONWIP PRODUCTION CONTROL STRATEGY FOR MULTI-PRODUCT MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS C.E. Onyeocha 1 and J. Geraghty 1 1. Enterprise Process Research Centre, School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland e-mail: chuks247@gmail.com and john.geraghty@dcu.ie ABSTRACT The Hybrid Kanban-CONWIP (HK-CONWIP) production control strategy provides a good method of combining Kanban and CONWIP strategies in achieving close-knit production stage (local) coordination and adequate global inventory control of the entire system. HK-CONWIP presents global inventory control in a system via the CONWIP control mechanism and also provides stage coordination which controls the stage inventory via the Kanban control mechanism. The strategy was initially presented for control of single product production lines in environments subject to moderate to high variability in cycle- time and demand distributions. Two policies for Kanban allocation in multi-product environments have been proposed in the literature; namely shared and dedicated Kanban Allocation policies. These policies can be operated within a Kanban-Like production control strategy to determine how a product receives an authorisation Kanban card at a production stage. However, owing to the mechanisms by which various Kanban- Like strategies release Kanban and/or Demand cards not all Kanban-Like strategies can operate a shared Kanban Allocation policy. This paper presents a modification of the HK-CONWIP control mechanism to accommodate a shared Kanban Allocation policy in a multi-product environment and proffers a modification approach that can be adopted for other Kanban-Like production control strategies that do not directly operate under a shared Kanban Allocation policy. KEYWORDS: Kanban-Like Production Control Strategies, Kanban Allocation Policies, Multi-product Manufacturing Systems; Hybrid Kanban-CONWIP 1. INTRODUCTION Organizations intending to adopt Kanban-Like Production Control Strategy (Kanban-Like PCS) are often challenged with the problem of identifying optimal and robust settings for the control parameters of these strategies and determining which Production Control Strategy (PCS) to adopt for their system. This challenge is even more prevalent and complicated in multi-product manufacturing environments. Much of the research in Kanban-Like Production Control Strategies focuses more in developing a simple framework and model for control of a single product manufacturing system [1-6]. Previous studies that considered