Manufacturing and Production Planning

Manufacturing and production planning encompasses a broad set of activities that span from the long-run strategic to the short-run operational. Further, firms must plan the production of materials ranging from raw materials and components, to WIP, to FGI. In this chapter, we review several planning applications which illustrate the type of analytic approaches that effective production planning requires. The chapter begins with an overview of general manufacturing capacity and production planning concepts and metrics. Next, we illustrate two applications where we explore the importance for production planning accuracy of carefully analyzing the relationship between end items and the product families that they (i.e., end items) comprise. We then turn to planning strategies that manufacturers may need to implement when their short-run production output levels cannot meet their customers’ demand levels. The chapter concludes with a summary of the techniques illustrated in this chapter.