Production Planning and Control (PPC)

Introduction

For efficient, effective and economical operation in a manufacturing unit of an organization, it is essential to integrate the production planning and control system. Production planning and subsequent production control follow adaption of product design and finalization of a production process.

Production planning and control address a fundamental problem of low productivity, inventory management and resource utilization.

Production planning is required for scheduling, dispatch, inspection, quality management, inventory management, supply management and equipment management. Production control ensures that production team can achieve required production target, optimum utilization of resources, quality management and cost savings.

Planning and control are an essential ingredient for success of an operation unit. The benefits of production planning and control are as follows:

• It ensures that optimum utilization of production capacity is achieved, by proper scheduling of the machine items which reduces the idle time as well as over use.
• It ensures that inventory level are maintained at optimum levels at all time, i.e. there is no over-stocking or under-stocking.
• It also ensures that production time is kept at optimum level and thereby increasing the turnover time.
• Since it overlooks all aspects of production, quality of final product is always maintained.

Production Planning

Production planning is one part of production planning and control dealing with basic concepts of what to produce, when to produce, how much to produce, etc. It involves taking a long-term view at overall production planning. Therefore, objectives of production planning are as follows:

• To ensure right quantity and quality of raw material, equipment, etc. are available during times of production.
• To ensure capacity utilization is in tune with forecast demand at all the time.

A well thought production planning ensures that overall production process is streamlined providing following benefits:

• Organization can deliver a product in a timely and regular manner.
• Supplier are informed will in advance for the requirement of raw materials.
• It reduces investment in inventory.
• It reduces overall production cost by driving in efficiency.

Production planning takes care of two basic strategies’ product planning and process planning. Production planning is done at three different time dependent levels i.e. long-range planning dealing with facility planning, capital investment, location planning, etc.; medium-range planning deals with demand forecast and capacity planning and lastly short term planning dealing with day to day operations.

Production Control

Production control looks to utilize different type of control techniques to achieve optimum performance out of the production system as to achieve overall production planning targets. Therefore, objectives of production control are as follows:

• Regulate inventory management
• Organize the production schedules
• Optimum utilization of resources and production process

The advantages of robust production control are as follows:

• Ensure a smooth flow of all production processes
• Ensure production cost savings thereby improving the bottom line
• Control wastage of resources
• It maintains standard of quality through the production life cycle.

Production control cannot be same across all the organization. Production control is dependent upon the following factors:

• Nature of production (job oriented, service oriented, etc.)
• Nature of operation
• Size of operation

Production planning and control are essential for customer delight and overall success of an organization.