One of the important scheduling and control problems that must be solved for the efficient operation of FMS could be the "part ordering problem" which is finding optimal sequence of parts to be released into a manufacturing system. In this paper an approach which solves the problem using simulation-optimization technique will be presented. Currently available heuristic approaches for dispatching rules can only get the near optimum at the local level because of the complexities of the system and the dependencies of its components whereas the proposed approach will try to get the global optimum for a given criterion.