Production plan and control: Elements of production planning and control
Manufacturing and producing a product can get pretty costly. The different resources that’s needed such as IT infrastructure, equipment and human labor can really give you a hard time. That’s why it’s important to always think frugally when it comes on to structuring your manufacturing processes.
Another factor that can add to that cost is producing poor quality product with a lot of defects. To tackle these issues and many others you need to do production planning and control. Production planning and control is basically a tool you can use to coordinate all the processes that goes into manufacturing a product into a production system.
When you practice production planning and control it makes certain that your product is created of the highest quality. It also makes certain that your product is always delivered on time in the best and cheapest possible way.
Production planning and control assist you in developing a plan before your manufacturing, production processes and activities even start. It also includes controlling the whole entire system to ensure that everything is going well as planned. You can also spot inefficiencies in the different processes as you are monitoring the system to make changes when necessary.
Production planning and control helps to put everything in a framework you can then use to manage your processes easier.
The main benefits of production planning and control are also very impressive. It will ensure that you make the maximum use of all your manufacturing resources. Furthermore it can help make your manufacturing processes more transparent so you can overview your processes more clearly.
Over and above that it can help you to maintain your inventory levels to prevent over production and reduce cost. Activities that are involved in the production planning process are designing the product, designing the layout of your manufacturing system to ensure that all the machines works in harmony to create quality product.
Determining the different equipment and the capacity requirement is also another activity that’s really important to do. There are two major factors that can help you in determining your production planning strategy. These are volume of production and structure of the production processes. The volume of production is the amount of products you are planning to produce in a given session.
This will help you to adjust your plans to see if you have the right amount of materials to get the job done. It will also help you to know if you got the machine power to handle all the demand to produce the product at a certain time.
The structure of the production processes will assist you in letting you know if your production system is structured efficiently. This will help you know if it can get the job done on time without losing a drop of quality.
To put everything in summary, production planning and control is a framework and management system. You can use on a daily basis to plan out your manufacturing and production processes in a coordinated fashion. It will make certain that your products are created on time and at the right quality and quantity.
This will help you to save cost on manufacturing and producing a product. Production planning and control also increases transparency within your organization. As a result of that it can make it easy for you to monitor the different processes and operations.
Production and manufacturing are one of those organizational functions that require strict and ongoing measurement of critical activities. Production processes that are efficient and effective use tools to track key production metrics and the top manufacturing KPIs. Tools like production and manufacturing metrics scorecards and dashboards are among the best production management tools. Because they will help you track everything in one place easily in no time.
Use our KPI development systems and templates to structure your production scorecard in terms of defining your top KPIs and metrics for production. You can take advantage of the excel dashboards to track everything in Excel dashboard report.