Mumbai University > Mechanical Engineering > Sem 7 > Production planning and control

Marks: 5M

Year: May 2016

Production planning is the planning of production and manufacturing modules 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.

1. Job or Task Scheduling: Preparation of time and action calendar for each order from order receiving to shipment. The job schedule contains list of tasks to be processed for the styles. Against each tasks planner mentions when to start a task and what is dead line for that task. Name of responsible person (department) for the job is being listed. For example, scheduling planned cut date (PCD), line loading date etc.

2. Material Resource Planning (Inventory): Preparation of Material requirement sheet according to sample product and buyer specification sheet. Consumption of material (fabric, thread, button, and twill tape) is calculated and estimated cost of each material.

3. Loading production: Planner defines which style to be loaded to the production line and how much quantity to be loaded.

4. Process selection & planning: Processes needed to complete an order vary style to style. According to the order (customer) requirement PPC department select processes for the orders. Sometime extra processes are eliminated to reduce cost of production.

5. Facility location: Where a company has multiple factories (facilities) for production and factories are set for specific product, planner need to identify which facility will be most suitable for new orders. Sometimes there may be a capacity shortage in a factory, in that case planner need to decide which facility will selected for that orders.

6. Estimating quantity and costs of production: Planner estimate daily production (units) according to the styles work content. With the estimated production figure, production runs and manpower involvement planner also estimate production cost per pieces.

7. Capacity planning: PPC department plays a major role during order booking. They decide (suggest) how much order they should accept according to their production capacity. Allocating of total capacity or deciding how much capacity to be used for an order out of total factory capacity. Regularly updating factories current capacity (production capacity).

8. Line planning: Preparing detailed line planning with daily production target for the production line. Most cases line planning is made after discussing with production team and Industrial engineers. Read - What is Line Planning?

9. Follow up and execution: Whatever plan is made is executed by PPC department. PPC department keeps close look whether everything is progressing according the plan. Chasing other department heads on daily basis to keep plan on track. They update order wise completed tasks on the Time & action Calendar. When they found something is going to be late they expedite and create an alarm about the delay.