Production Planning
Production planning addresses productivity, inventory management and resource utilization, ensuring these are in tune with each other and the bigger picture. On top of this, production planning involves establishing manufacturing goals from with financial, operational, HR KPIs and realities. Production planners are tasked with finding the most effective way to allocate resources, activities, employees, materials and capacity to make production happen.
To establish a production plan for specific duration of time, planners must determine the product mix, match production to resources, set up time tables and delivering production orders.
Production planning is an “all hands on deck” operation. Everyone from marketing to sales to HR to customer service to operations has a hand in determining sales forecasts, customer orders, projected demand, capacity and sales. Planners must have access to an array of information including materials, purchasing, engineering, HR, financial, sales, marketing and distribution. They must also be able to reconcile, compare and make sense of this information in order to create a comprehensive plan and determine which demand fluctuation strategy to choose: chase demand, level production, or mixed strategy.
With this in mind, it’s no wonder that successful production planning relies heavily on the integration of processes and systems, especially operations, finance, and the CRM. Not only do these systems allow planners to better gauge past demand and buyer behaviour, current resources and orders, but also project that information into the future. Creating sales forecasts, what-if scenarios, and models that take into account a variety of variables are essential functions, but even more so, is the availability and accuracy of this information to the planner and their ability to look at data from different departments next to one another.