Production Planning
- Production planning is the planning of production and manufacturing processes in a company or industry. It utilizes the resource allocation of activities of employees, materials and production capacity, in order to serve different customers.
- Different types of production methods, such as single item manufacturing, batch production, mass production, continuous production etc. have their own type of production planning.
- Production planning can be combined with production control into production planning and control, or it can be combined and or integrated into enterprise resource planning.
- Production planning is used in companies in several different industries, including agriculture, industry, amusement industry, etc.
- Production planning is a plan for the future production, in which the facilities needed are determined and arranged. A production planning is made periodically for a specific time period, called the planning horizon. It can comprise the following activities:
- Determination of the required product mix and factory load to satisfy customers needs.
- Matching the required level of production to the existing resources.
- Scheduling and choosing the actual work to be started in the manufacturing facility.
- Setting up and delivering production orders to production facilities.
- In order to develop production plans, the production planner or production planning department needs to work closely together with the marketing department and sales department. They can provide sales forecasts, or a listing of customer orders.
- The work is usually selected from a variety of product types which may require different resources and serve different customers.
- Therefore, the selection must optimize customer-independent performance measures such as cycle time and customer-dependent performance measures such as on-time delivery.
- A critical factors in production planning is "the accurate estimation of the productive capacity of available resources, yet this is one of the most difficult tasks to perform well."
- Production planning should always take "into account material availability, resource availability and knowledge of future demand."
- Modern production planning methods and tools have been developed since late 19th century. Under Scientific Management, the work for each man or each machine is mapped out in advance. The origin of production planning back goes another century.
- Advanced planning and scheduling refers to a manufacturing management process by which raw materials and production capacity are optimally allocated to meet demand. APS is especially well-suited to environments where simpler planning methods cannot adequately address complex trade-offs between competing priorities.
- Production scheduling is intrinsically very difficult due to the factorial dependence of the size of the solution space on the number of items/products to be manufactured.
- Capacity planning is the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products. In the context of capacity planning, design capacity is the maximum amount of work that an organization is capable of completing in a given period.
- Effective capacity is the maximum amount of work that an organization is capable of completing in a given period due to constraints such as quality problems, delays, material handling, etc. The phrase is also used in business computing as a synonym for capacity management.
- A master production schedule (MPS) is a plan for individual commodities to produce in each time period such as production, staffing, inventory, etc. It is usually linked to manufacturing where the plan indicates when and how much of each product will be demanded.
- This plan quantifies significant processes, parts, and other resources in order to optimize production, to identify bottlenecks, and to anticipate needs and completed goods. Since an MPS drives much factory activity, its accuracy and viability dramatically affect profitability. Typical MPS's are created by software with user tweaking.
- Material requirements planning (MRP) is a production planning, scheduling, and inventory control system used to manage manufacturing processes. Most MRP systems are software-based, while it is possible to conduct MRP by hand as well.
- Manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) is defined as a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company. Ideally, it addresses operational planning in units, financial planning, and has a simulation capability to answer "what-if" questions and extension of closed-loop MRP.
- Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling and optimizing work and workloads in a production process or manufacturing process. Scheduling is used to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials.
- A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of business activity enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person or group, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.
- Employee scheduling software automates the process of creating and maintaining a schedule. Such software will usually track vacation time, sick time, compensation time, and alert when there are conflicts. As scheduling data is accumulated over time, it may be extracted for payroll or to analyze past activity.
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a business management software-usually a suite of integrated applications-that a company can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities, including:
\[-\] Product planning, cost
\[-\] Manufacturing or service delivery
\[-\] Marketing and sales
\[-\] Inventory management
\[-\] Shipping and payment
- Inventory Control is the supervision of supply, storage and accessibility of items in order to ensure an adequate supply without excessive oversupply.
- Product Planning is the on going process of identifying and articulating market requirements that define a product's feature set. Product planning serves as the basis for decisions about price, distribution and promotion. Product planning is the process of creating a product idea and following through on it until the product is introduced to the market.
- Project planning is part of project management, which relates to the use of schedules such as Gantt charts to plan and subsequently report progress within the project environment.
- Process planning is concerned with determining the sequence of individual manufacturing operations needed to produce a given part or product. The resulting operation sequence is documented on a form typically referred to as a route sheet containing a listing of the production operations and associated machine tools for a work part or assembly.
- Process planning in manufacturing also refers to the planning of use of blanks, spare parts, packaging material, user instructions (manuals) etc.
- Sales and operations planning is an integrated business management process developed in the 1980s by Oliver Wight through which the executive/leadership team continually achieves focus, alignment and synchronization among all functions of the organization.
- The S&OP planning includes an updated forecast that leads to a sales plan, production plan, inventory plan, customer lead time (backlog) plan, new product development plan, strategic initiative plan and resulting financial plan.
- Strategy is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.
- Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve these goals are usually limited. Strategy generally involves setting goals, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions.
