Importance of a Master Plan within the Planning and Control of Production

Production planning and scheduling are designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets, and analyzing workloads. The activity related to production planning and scheduling is intended to appropriately relate the demand, through a commercial work, to the external supply within a defined time plane in the medium and long term. Thus, production plans can be specified with specific quantities of each product by virtue of a series of stages or periods, trying to be within the limits of the installed capacity and under the criteria of the disposition of flows on materials and technical resources, which forms an adequate scheme to satisfy the demand.

The set of elements that integrate production planning are listed below:

• Time for execution according to the production planning: short, medium, and long term.

• Installed production capacity: fixed costs and in the variables of the technical process.

• Quantities to be manufactured in each period to satisfy the demand of products.

• Level of inventories, which are maintained from one period to another. includes materials, components, tools, semi-finished products, and finished products.

• Overall objective: maximize process performance, minimizing production costs, and maximizing product quality.

Adequate production planning seeks to optimize production capacity taking into account existing inventories, available resources, and expected demand. Thus, it becomes a global approach to a production line.

Of course, starting from production planning, a master plan must be drawn up specifying the products to be manufactured, quantities, and periods. All these data are collected in the master plan, determining the different workloads of the cost centers, the working hours, necessary materials, etc. For this purpose, models and operational or quantitative techniques are used to facilitate the articulation of production planning. Within this planning, it is necessary to determine the set of resource needs, looking for the balance between the manufacturing lines and the capacity that each workplace or device has.

Starting from the master plan, the planning and control of the needs of the different materials are required, considering the minimization of the stocks and, therefore, of the storage costs.

The next phase includes the scheduling of operations, limited to the set of models and operational, analytical, and graphic techniques that set the master plan in motion, combining material requirements and capacity constraints of the system parts.

Closely linked to the planning task we have control of production, monopolizing the work of monitoring compliance with the master plan and controlling costs in addition to the yields of the production process.

Finally, within production planning and scheduling we find quality control. It represents the monitoring of the specifications of the functionality and attributes of the products, following certain certification standards, pursuing the "zero defects", the maximum satisfaction of the consumer, and trying to avoid the costs and damages resulting from the production of products of low or zero quality.