Overview of Production Planning (MRP and Supply Chain Planning Help)


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Overview of Production Planning

Production Planning is one of the logical steps in managing the supply chain. In creating a production plan, a company looks at the big picture (the aggregate) rather than the level of the individual product or item, predicting a level of manufacturing output in accordance with predicted sales and other company goals and constraints.

Because production planning occurs at an aggregate level, creating a production plan involves grouping products into product families. These groupings are based on products' similarities in design, manufacturing process, and resource usage. You can assign planning percentages to the members of the product family, and use the relationship between product family items and its members in forecast explosion, consumption, master scheduling, and capacity and materials planning. Production Planning enables forecasts for the product family to be exploded down to the product family members (based on the planning percentages and effectivity dates for the member items) in a process similar to that of exploding a forecast for a model.

Sales orders for member items consume the forecast for the member items as well as for the product family. Throughout the application, processing is done at both the aggregate and the detail level. Thus, you will be able to get detailed and high-level information about how well your organization is executing its production plans.

Overview of Production Planning

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