Manufacturing Control

Abstract

The manufacturing plant consists of an assortment of raw materials, components, machines of various type, and an variety of skilled workers, with the goal to produce goods to a higher level, and some to finished-good-items. The management’s task of coordinating all this activity is difficult indeed. A first concern of the management is to periodically generate a production plan for the coming planning horizon. This plan pertains to the aggregate of all items in the plant and yields the volume of production for all. The plan depends on the type of items to produce: make-to-stock, make-to-order, or a combination of make-to-stock and to order. For each finished-good-item, a master production plan is generated to coordinate the schedule that satisfies the inventory status and customer demands. This schedule also yields the available-to-promise quantity that is a vital tool to the sales force. The concept of raw load and level load by future time periods for various production centers in the plant are described. To ensure the schedule of all items are doable, a rough-cut capacity planning analysis is calculated for each of the production centers in the plant. When the capacity does not meet the load, adjustments are required. For every item to be produced, a bill-of-material is used to identify each of the parts and components that are required in the build. From here, a materials requirement planning set of computations determines the build schedule for every item.