Moeen Sammak Jalali - Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology,Tehran, Iran,
S. T. A. Niaki - Distinguished Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

In today's ever-changing competitive markets, manufacturing companies are challenged to cope with a growing demand for customized products, which will rebound to the complexity of production in various aspects. On the other hand, facilitating production arrangement policies to respond to demand is considered a wellorganized and eminent means of improving production efficiency. Due to the simultaneous use of base warehouse and base order systems, hybrid make-to-stock (MTS)/make-to-order (MTO) production systems are considered valuable manufacturing systems to meet current market conditions such as demand uncertainty and raw material lacks, and rising costs of inventory maintenance. This paper investigates numerous aspects of hybrid manufacturing environments and suggests a heuristic mechanism for assessing and improving the performance of such systems.

Hybrid manufacturing systems; Make-to-stock/make-to-order; evaluation; heuristic mechanism; conceptual framework.