Production Planning

Introducing New Products and Services

2008-05-26T15:51:00.001+08:00

Introducing New Products and Services
The following video is on Introducing New Products and Services

Life Cycle of a Production System

2008-05-26T15:18:00.004+08:00

Life Cycle of a Production System

Product management is an organizational function within a company dealing with the planning or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle. Product Management is also a collective term used to describe the broad sum of diverse activities performed in the interest of delivering a particular product to market.

Understanding Product Life Cycle plays an important role in this.

Product Life Cycle Management is the succession of strategies used by management as a product goes through its product life cycle. The conditions in which a product is sold changes over time and must be managed as it moves through its succession of stages.

Product life cycle

The product life cycle goes through many phases and involves many professional disciplines and requires many skills, tools and processes. Product life cycle (PLC) has to do with the life of a product in the market with respect to business/commercial costs and sales measures; whereas product lifecycle management (PLM) has more to do with managing descriptions and properties of a product through its development and useful life, mainly from a business/engineering point of view.To say that a product has a life cycle is to assert four things that products have a limited life, product sales pass through distinct stages, each posing different challenges, opportunities, and problems to the seller,profits rise and fall at different stages of product life cycle, products require different marketing, financial, manufacturing, purchasing, and human resource strategies in each life cycle stage.

The different stages in a product life cycle are:

1. Market introduction stage

* cost high
* sales volume low
* no/little competition - competitive manufacturers watch for acceptance/segment growth losses
* demand has to be created
* customers have to be prompted to try the product

2. Growth stage

* costs reduced due to economies of scale
* sales volume increases significantly
* profitability
* public awareness
* competition begins to increase with a few new players in establishing market
* prices to maximize market share

3. Mature stage

* Costs are very low as you are well established in market & no need for publicity.
* sales volume peaks
* increase in competitive offerings
* prices tend to drop due to the proliferation of competing products
* brand differentiation, feature diversification, as each player seeks to differentiate from competition with "how much product" is offered
* Industrial profits go down

4. Decline or Stability stage

* costs become counter-optimal
* sales volume decline or stabilize
* prices, profitability diminish
* profit becomes more a challenge of production/distribution efficiency than increased sales

Facility Layout Planning in Production Management

2008-05-26T14:04:00.003+08:00

Facility Layout Planning in Production Management
This video is about Facility Layout Planning in Production Planning and Control. You can find more videos on Production Planning at http://productionplanning.blogspot.com

More videos on Production Planning are available at Production Planning Videos. Although we do our best to collect the most related items to related production planning topic, the Production Planning videos are collection of items from various resources not necessarily reflecting our views.

Aggregate Production Planning

2008-05-26T13:50:00.001+08:00

Aggregate Production Planning
This video is about Aggregate Production Planning Basic Concepts.

Aggregate planning is an operational activity which does an aggregate plan for the production process, in advance of 2 to 18 months, to give an idea to management as to what quantity of materials and other resources are to be procured and when, so that the total cost of operations of the organisation is kept to the minimum over that period.

The quantity of outsourcing, subcontracting of items, overtime of labour, numbers to be hired and fired in each period and the amount of inventory to be held in stock and to be backlogged for each period are decided. All of these activities are done within the framework of the company ethics, policies, and long term commitment to the society, community and the country of operation.

Aggregate planning has certain prerequired inputs which are inevitable. They include:

* Information about the resources and the facilities available.
* Demand forecast for the period for which the planning has to be done.
* Cost of various alternatives and resources. This includes cost of holding inventory, ordering cost, cost of production through various production alternatives like subcontracting, backordering and overtime.
* Organisational policies regarding the usage of above alternatives.

"Aggregate Planning is concerned with matching supply and demand of output over the medium time range, up to approximately 12 months into the future. Term aggregate implies that the planning is done for a single overall measure of output or, at the most, a few aggregated product categories. The aim of aggregate planning is to set overall output levels in the near to medium future in the face of fluctuating or uncertain demands. Aggregate planning might seek to influence demand as well as supply."

Schroeder, R.G (2007). Operations management. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Inrwin

Aggregate Planning Video

Production Planning Jobs

2008-01-03T20:05:00.001+08:00

Production Planning Job Description

What is Lean Production?

2006-11-25T16:18:00.001+08:00

What is Lean Production?

Lean production or Lean Manufacturing is a management philosophy focusing on reduction of the seven wastes.

Over-production
Waiting time
Transportation
Processing
Inventory
Motion
Scrap in manufactured products or any type of business.

By eliminating waste (muda *), quality is improved, production time and costs are reduced.To solve the problem of waste, Lean Manufacturing has several "tools" at its disposal. These include constant process analysis (kaizen), "pull" production (by means of kanban) and mistake-proofing (poka-yoke).

Types of waste
Toyota defined seven categories or types of waste.

Overproduction (making more than what is needed, or making it earlier than needed)
Transportation (moving products farther than is minimally required)
Waiting (products waiting on the next production step, or people waiting for work to do)
Inventory (having more inventory than is minimally required)
Motion (people moving or walking more than minimally required)
Processing itself
Defects (the effort involved in inspecting for and fixing defects)

These terms are important to understand lean manufacturing.

*Muda means Waste in Japanese and very important to understand Lean Production Methodology

Calculation of Economic Batch Quantities or Economic Order Quantities (EOQ EBQ Calculation)

2006-11-22T17:31:00.001+08:00

Calculation of Economic Batch Quantities or Economic Order Quantities (EOQ EBQ Calculation)

When Production managers make decisions, one of the most important quesitons to be answered is how many products should be produced in a particular production batch. (Especially for Batch production companies). This number may be calculated quickly by Economic Batch quantities. The idea of Economic Batch Quantity may also be used for procurement management purposes. Purchasing departments should make use of Economic Order Quantity idea when buying the raw materials. The theory is valid with certain assumptions. It will not usually give right results in case of price breakdowns (price discounts) in case of procurement management. Since price breakdowns are not an issue with production setups, EBQ is a good tool for production managers.

There are 2 cost parameters to decide economic order quantity. One is the inventory holding cost, another is order cost. Order (or setup) cost decreases dramatically with number of order size. However, the economic batch quantity will be somewhere before the maximum order size due to inventory holding cost which increases linearly.

You can calculate Economic Order (or Economic Batch) Quantities from the following link:- Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) Calculation in Production Planning

What is production planning?

2006-06-15T21:14:00.002+08:00

What is production planning?

Manufacturing planning and control entails the acquisition and allocation of limited resources to production activities so as to satisfy customer demand over a specified time horizon. As such, planning and control problems are inherently optimization problems, where the objective is to develop a plan that meets demand at minimum cost or that fills the demand that maximizes profit. The underlying optimization problem will vary due to differences in the manufacturing and market context. This chapter provides a framework for discrete-parts manufacturing planning and control and provides an overview of applicable model formulations.

Manufacturing planning and control address decisions on the acquisition, utilization and allocation of production resources to satisfy customer requirements in the most efficient and effective way. Typical decisions include work force level, production lot sizes, assignment of overtime and sequencing of production runs. Optimization models are widely applicable for providing decision support in this context.