Production Planning Software – is a program that manages plans for manufacturing. Production planning management is a crucial stage of manufacturing. Production planning is the process of deciding how products will be produced, how much will be produced and how this activity can be controlled.
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Best Production Planning Software
Now that you have your wishlist in order, it’s time to review our picks of the top production planning software.
MRPeasy
MRPeasy is a cloud-based material requirements planning (MRP) software intended for small manufacturing plants. Some of its key features include purchase order management, forecasting, stock management and more.
Schedule Production with Ease
The production scheduling module allows you to review all of your expected manufacturing orders (MO). Bill of materials (BOM), purchasing and stocking are managed in one place, enabling you to book items in stock and promptly increase purchase orders (PO) for purchased parts. This feature also permits you to:
- Access details on all of your MOs
- View MOs as one block or as separate operations
- Drag-and-drop to reschedule MOs and operations
- Monitor scheduled orders in calendar or Gantt chart views
Predict Production Patterns
The forecasting accessory grants you with an array of abilities including:
- Generating and processing material forecasts
- Ciphering material requirements for building products
- Study or ignore current material inventory levels
- Determine deadlines for placing purchase orders and dates to produce orders
- Develop MOs and POs based on forecasts
Seamlessly Manage MOs
You can draft, edit and update MOs with the production planning component. This module contains a complete synopsis of all your MOs. You can review their progress by order or part availability status. You can also search, filter and export your MOs.
Other Noteworthy Tools
MRPeasy comes with other mentionable modules.
- Useful Bookkeeping: The built-in accounting tool is comprised of a general ledger, balance sheets, chart of accounts and a profit and loss statement. Any purchase made in manufacturing, stock, procurement and customer relationship management (CRM) automatically appears in accounting.
- Effective CRM Data: MRPeasy’s CRM module allows you to oversee sales statistics, cash flow forecasts and profit and loss statements of your entire plant. You can also manage customer orders, track orders and payments and craft quotes and invoices.
- Keep POs Organized: You can view a complete list of POs from vendors and subcontractors as well as add, edit and update them.
- Visibility of Inventory: You gain a transparent history of stock operations because this module provides real-time stock movements. This module also enables you to track batches and serial numbers.
- Informative Routing: Routing is a report that displays an intricate list of a product’s production stages. This accessory permits you to view cost estimates so you can draft MOs, edit current routings, or import new and existing routings.
- Develop Statistical Reports: This module allows you to develop statistical reports from MOs that are either custom-made or chosen from pre-determined options.
SAP S/4 HANA
SAP S/4 HANA is a solution that consists of artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), embedded analytics and more to streamline your manufacturing practices. Its key features include asset management, supply chain management and financial management.
Organize Manufacturing Practices
The manufacturing tool permits you to organize every stage of your operations from material requirements to inventory. You can promptly modify information as you receive it from the business, supplier or plant floor. This module enables you to draft plans for complex assembly such as:
- Material requirements
- Production planning
- BOMs
- Routing
- Factory layout
- Machine models
You can harmonize cooperation with the research and development teams with sleek deliveries of engineering files, BOMs and design changes.
Plan for Material Requirements
The material requirement planning component keeps you in the loop of your supplies. You oversee stock-outs, instantaneously develop procurement proposals for purchasing and production and employ production planners to ensure the availability of procured or produced materials at the ideal time.
You can employ numerous manufacturing models such as make to stock, make to order and engineer to order. Make to stock is when facilities match their inventory with customer demand. Make to order is when customers purchase products tailored to their requirements. Engineer to order is when facilities receive an order and design, engineer and finish it.
This accessory comes with other abilities.
- Heuristic structure
- Limited capacity planning, scheduling and optimization
- Industry-specific features such as repairable parts maintenance (RPM) and more.
- Simulations, including transactional simulation
Evaluate A Product’s Quality
Another tool is inspection planning. It permits you to improve the quality of your products. It sends all of the quality-related information across your business and pinpoints potential risks and defects in early development stages.
Supervise Supply Chain
SAP S/4 HANA’s supply chain management accessory views business rules, material accessibility and allocation policies to determine product availability and promise dates for consumers. You can control warehouse activities and processes by implementing asset use and total output with the best picking, packing and shipping methods. This tool enables you to arrange product movements across inbound, outbound and physical inventory processes to manage waste, damage, loss and production interruption.
Other Noteworthy Tools
SAP S/4 HANA comes with other mentionable modules.
- Monitor Assets: This tool offers planning, scheduling and executing maintenance activities for assets. It performs planned and unplanned maintenance tasks to streamline operations and notify technicians to detect, report and fix malfunctions and emergencies.
- Analyze Spending Data: The procurement accessory provides sharp glimpses of purchases by analyzing purchase orders, purchase requisitions, invoices and contracts.
- Systemize Orders and Contracts: You can supervise order-to-cash processes across all channels and interfaces. This feature also enables you to store contracts in one place.
What Is Production Planning?
Production planning is the process of deciding how a product or service will be manufactured before the manufacturing process begins. In other words, it is how you plan to manage your supply chain, raw materials, employees and the physical space where the manufacturing process takes place.
Production planning is very important for manufacturers as it affects other important aspects of their business such as:
- Supply chain management
- Production Scheduling
- Material requirements planning
- Production lead time
- Capacity planning
Why Is Production Planning Important?
If a manufacturing operation wishes to expand, that evolution demands careful production planning and production scheduling. Someone must take on the responsibility of managing resources and deciding how they will be allocated. This process is a big part of capacity planning—how much can be made in a certain period of time, with the available resources?
Without production planning, it is easy to use too much of a resource for one product and not leave enough for another, or fail to schedule your resources properly, which results in delays that affect your production scheduling. It’s just as easy to let resources go to waste. These issues indicate a lack of efficiency in your production planning process.
No matter the product or service or the size of the operation, production planning is the best way to ensure resources are used appropriately, products and services are high-quality and nothing goes over budget.
Key Features For Project Planning Tools
- Gantt chart builder (or see a roundup of Gantt chart tools)
- Team collaboration tools (or see a roundup of collaboration tools)
- Resource planning (or see a round-up of resource management tools)
- Workflow management (or see a round-up of workflow management tools)
- Requirements management (or see a round-up of requirements management tools)
- Analytics & reporting tools (or see a round-up of reporting tools)
- Timeline & schedule builder
- Budget management & planning
- File sharing & file management
- Drag and drop schedule editing
- Work management (task lists, task boards)
Project Planning Comparison Criteria
What am I looking for when we select project planning tools for review? Beyond the key features that I look for, here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Is it clean and attractive?
- Usability: Is it easy to learn and master? Does the company offer good tech support, user support, tutorials, and training? Do they offer apps for Android and iOS, and how well do they work?
- Integrations: Is it easy to connect with other tools? Any pre-built integrations?
- Value for $: How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent, and flexible? Do they offer a free plan or free trial?
How to Make a Production Plan
When you set out to create a production plan, make sure to follow these 5 steps to make it as robust as possible.
1. Estimate/Forecast Product Demand
Understanding product demand planning is the best way to decide which product planning method is the best choice for your operation. From here, you’ll be able to estimate which resources are required and how they’ll be used in the manufacturing process.
2. Access Inventory
Accessing inventory is about more than simply taking stock: you should make an inventory management plan so that you don’t experience shortages or let things go to waste. For this step, focus on the inventory control and inventory management techniques you can use to handle inventory in the most efficient way possible.
3. Resource Planning
A successful production plan requires you to be familiar with the resource planning details of the manufacturing process. Note the minimum number of people and raw material requirements necessary to create a product or execute a service. You need to also consider what machines and systems are essential for executing your production plan.
4. Monitor Production
As production takes place, monitor how the results compare to the production schedule and resource management projections. This is something that should continually take place and be documented during the production process. Monitoring production is especially important to the fifth step in the production planning process.
5. Adjust the Plan to Make Production More Efficient in the Future
The final step of production planning is to reflect on the information you gained in step four and strategize what can be done to make the production plan run more smoothly in the future. Production planning is about manufacturing a product or service, yes, but it should also be a learning experience for creating even better production plans for next time.
Conclusion
Manufacturing planning software is a production management tool used for manufacturing and operations. These software packages allow manufacturers to manage orders, inventory and resources such as labor and materials. Production planning software improves production process efficiency.