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 with enterprise resource planning

Overview:

Production planning is the future of production. It can help in efficient manufacturing or setting up of a production site by facilitating required needs. A production plan is made periodically for a specific time period, called the planning horizon. It can comprise the following activities:

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".

Production is a process of combining various material inputs and immaterial inputs (plans, know-how) in order to make something for consumption (output). It is the act of creating an output, a good or service which has value and contributes to the utility of individuals.

Production Management refers to the application of management principles to the production function in a factory. In other words, production management involves application of planning, organizing, directing and controlling the production process.

Planning & Production Management