What is Production Planning?

At its core, production planning represents the beating heart of any manufacturing process. Its purpose is to minimise production time and costs, efficiently organise the use of resources and maximise efficiency in the workplace.

Production planning incorporates a multiplicity of production elements, ranging from the everyday activities of staff to the ability to realise accurate delivery times for the customer. With an effective production planning operation at its nucleus, any form of manufacturing process has the capability to exploit its full potential.

You can find everything that you could possibly need to know about production planning on this page by selecting the relevant article from the summaries below or the menu on the left.

Project Planning vs Finite Scheduling

It is not uncommon for people to assume that project planning and finite scheduling software perform the same task. You can see why this happens from a cursory review of these types of software, since both utilize Gantt charts to show visually the work that has to be completed...
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Capacity Planning Overiew

As defined by the APICS Dictionary, “Capacity planning or capacity requirements planning is the function of establishing, measuring and adjusting limits or levels of capacity. The term “capacity requirements planning” in this context is the process of determining how much labor and machine resource is required to accomplish the tasks of production”...
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Supply Chain Scheduling

The term Supply Chain Scheduling (SCS) may be new to you, but I'm sure you will be aware of some of the other technologies that have been used to try and improve the efficiency of supply chains, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems, etc. So where, you may ask, does SCS differ from these other techniques, and why should you want it if you haven't found a use for EDI and SCM...
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Algorithmic Sequencing

Algorithmic sequencing is one method for schedule construction. The sequencer uses an algorithm to select an order and places each operation for that order on the planning board. It repeats this process until all orders (and therefore, all operations) have been loaded. Each operation is loaded on its specified resource at the first available time slot that satisfies the constraints for that operation...
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Simulation-Based Sequencing

Simulation-based sequencing provides an attractive alternative to algorithmic sequencing by providing a simple, yet very flexible method for constructing a schedule. In general, a simulation-based sequencer can also produce any schedule that is produced by an algorithmic sequencer. However, a simulation-based sequencer can also consider many schedules that cannot be considered by an algorithmic sequencer. Hence, the simulation-based sequencing approach, sometimes referred to as a Resource Based Method or Parallel Loading, can create better schedules than an algorithmic sequencer, but this would depend very much on what you consider to be a 'better' schedule...
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Supply Chain Management

The Supply Chain describes the succession of suppliers, manufacturers, storage facilities, distributors and customers that allow products to be ordered, produced and delivered...
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