Production Planning is the act of resource allocation of staff activities, materials, and manufacturing capacity in order to serve clients. This process should be flexible enough to adapt to uncertainties while produce an optimal product at any given time
In many businesses, a manager have responsibility for a large number of products and services. Products must be produced and delivered at various times to various customers on demand and at competitive prices.
If there are too many products, you should assign them to their own “production line” and one person or team. Production planning differs depending on the type of production method used. For example, there is single item manufacturing, batch production, mass production, continuous production, and so on.
In this article we’ll talk more about production planning.
What’s Production Planning?
Production planning is an administrative procedure that takes place within a manufacturing company to ensure that enough raw materials, workers, and other necessary goods are available to generate final products according to the timetable.
It is also an important part of management strategy as it influences profits, product quality, and efficiency in production.
In theory, planning involves establishing goals and targets for the organization’s activities over time (planning horizon), analyzing the state of resources to determine if they are adequate or not.
Also, identifying the most efficient ways to produce using these resources and determining how much of each resource you need. Finally, deciding when this allocation of resources should take place.
Why Production Planning is necessary?
Production planning is critical because it establishes an efficient production process that meets the needs of customers and organizations. It also determines how many products are produced in a given time frame, and whether or not there is enough.
On a manufacturing environment, product planning must be based on information provided by suppliers and customers about the specifications for their products. Then, the expected amount of orders during the planning period, as well as current availability of components and raw materials to produce those products are important.
Planning software can help with this process by providing a tool for estimating future quantities of order requests and component availability based on customer and supplier requirements.
Different methods for Production Planning
- Master production schedules (MPS) are timetables for individual commodities production over a specific period of time.
- Planning for material requirements — MRP is a production planning, scheduling, and inventory control system. MRP assures raw material availability, keeps in-house material and product levels to a minimum, and plans manufacturing and purchasing activities.
- The process of determining an organization’s capacity to meet changing demands is the capacity planning.
- Workflow planning is the planning of a series of operations carried out by an individual or a group of individuals.
In sum
As the production line and manufacturing efforts as a whole became bigger and more complex, more involved production planning is necessary.
This makes necessary having a way to track the production of components so tracking as well as manufacturing is efficient. Using accurate information about their progress on assembly path from one stage to the next for each component.
Or assembled into the final product or goods set that will eventually leave the factory and go to the customer’s house or business or what-have-you location(s).
