The Importance of Proper Production Planning in Manufacturing

Production planning plays an important role for any successful business, but it’s hard to find a case where planning or scheduling would have as great an impact as with manufacturing companies, where bad production planning might be a beginning of a disaster or proper planning may be a strong competitive advantage. As Benjamin Franklin once said:

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”

This is so true. If you are a manufacturing company, you need to be able to accurately and most efficiently plan your currently available resources in terms of materials, equipment, and workforce.

Only big companies need planning automation – false

There is a common belief that only big businesses should focus on automation of production planning processes whereas smaller businesses would hardly notice any benefits. In fact, this is not true. In the manufacturing industry planning and scheduling are the cornerstones of a successful production process, which has a direct impact on the quality of services provided.

Keep up with the best practices in production planning

Companies who try to avoid automation and instead of using modern solutions, such as enterprise resource planning software, or with manufacturing companies – MRP (material requirements planning) software – and still rely on traditional ways to plan production are simply not as effective as their competitors who align their processes with current trends and successful practices.

Not every piece of MRP software is a good solution

It is important to point out, that the fact that you use some sort of ERP or MRP software for production planning or scheduling which was released a decade ago, might already mean, that you are doing things the old way. It is a fact that outdated legacy systems are expensive, complicated and inefficient when comparing to popular SaaS ERP/MRP systems like MRPeasy.

A happy client is the main indicator of proper production planning

At first sight, it might seem unclear how production planning or scheduling can directly be connected to a client’s satisfaction. But it is and here’s how: there are two main questions which get answered, thanks to a great production planning processes automation:

1. “How much will it cost to produce a certain quantity of items?”
2. “How long will it take to produce?”

These two questions are of extreme importance to your clients. If you have an accurate answer, then not only you will get clients, you will also make them satisfied. At the same time, if you fail to answer either of these two questions, it might result in additional costs or even a loss for you due to missed deadlines or excess/deficit of inventory, not to mention missed opportunities.