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

Marks: 5M

Year: Dec 2015, 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 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 factor 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.

Problems due to lack of Production Planning

1. Improper planing may disturb entire cycle chain
2. It may affect development stages of product like raw material inspection, shop floor production, in house inspection etc.
3. The entire product outlook cannot be observed unless there is a proper selection of process parameters
4. There is a higher variation in the process planning if the standard procedures for a particular product with respect to the customer requirements is not followed.
5. The product at the end gets delayed , due to which they cannot reach the customers on time. This may also cause dissatisfaction to the end customers.
6. At every stage/phase of product development due to improper plans the process may not start in time. Thus, affecting the overall product chain.

The lack of Production Planning results in collapse of the entire cycle as shown in the above figure. In the end Customer won’t get the desired product as per his expectations. Industry will fail to deliver the product to the customer in the required time, within the budget and with the required characteristics. There will not be any coordination amongst the Departments in an Industry hence the Industry would ultimately fail in manufacturing the product.