MERVE ALPEREN
2009503098
Industrial Engineering Department, The 2nd class
Email:mervealperen@hotmail.com
Dokuz Eylul University,IZMIR
WHAT IS PRODUCTION PLANNING?
Product Planning is the incessant process of identifying and
articulating market requirement that define a product’s
feature set. At its core, production planning predicates the
beating heart of any manufacturing process. Its purpose is
to minimise production time and costs, efficiently organise
the use of resources and maximise efficiency in the
workplace.
An Information Product Plan will thus provide continuity for all
parts of the product's life cycle, prevent fragmentation or
duplication of effort, and identify funding needs. Life cycle
elements include the following:
A: Planning
B: Development
C: Dissemination
D: Documentation
E: Storage
F: Evaluation
G: Disposition
A. Planning entails the early identification of purpose, targeted
audience(s), suitable media, and costs.
B. Development includes information acquisition, creation, peer
review, editing, clearances (copyright, image releases, and other
legal concerns), design, layout, printing, programming,
manufacturing, and other production processes.
C. Dissemination encompasses a range of activities including
advertising product usability, serving and maintaining electronic
documents, conducting initial mailings (including copies to
custodian libraries), stocking sales outlets, and managing
requests.
D. Documentation concludes cataloging, entering bibliographic
information into various USGS databases, indexing, and
collecting metadata according to national and Federal
standards.
E. Storage addresses warehousing, inventorying, and ongoing
archiving.
F. Evaluation includes determining the effectiveness of products.
G. Disposition is the periodic determination of the need for an
information product to be reeditioned, revised, or removed from
inventory.
Competitive analysis is also an important part of product
planning. Your customers, sales channels, and prospects
evaluating your product will tell you where you fall short
competitively. Additionally listen to your prospects when they
are asking you about your product features and directions. Often
times they are parroting back information that your competitor's
have given them.
Market analysis is also important. Trends in the industry need to
be factored into your product plans. Your engineering group will
also provide some good ideas in this area; they are generally on
top of many of the new technologies
PRODUCTION PLANNING AND CONTROL’S MAIN FUNCTIONS
•Forecasting to predict customer demand on various products
over a given horizon.
•Aggregate Planning to determine overall resources needed.
•Materials Requirement Planning to determine all required
components and timing.
•Inventory Management to decide production or purchase
quantities and timing.
•Scheduling to determine shop-floor schedule of various
components
MARKET REQUIREMENTS REFINED
Once the product is approved you can refine the market
requirements, adding more detail on the desired features of the
product and how the customers will use the product.There will be two
types of MRDs, one for new products and a second for new releases
of a current product.
DEVELOPMENT INITIATED
Once the MRD is complete, the developers can start to work on a
functional specification and prototypes. Some companies combine
the MRD and Functional Specification into one document to help
them decrease time to market. To do this, you must work very closely
with engineering to make sure that the functional design of the
product will indeed meet customer requirements.
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
You need enough information so that the product can be easily
described in one or two sentences to customers or other people within
the company. Who buys the product? Why is the product of value to the
buyer? Why is it better than the competition?
MARKET JUSTIFICATİON
Why should the company
build this product? Who
needs it? How much will they
buy?
Including
market
numbers and real sales
projections will help you
determine the size and the
viability of the market.
RESOURCE PROJECTION:
Work with the engineering organization to get an initial very
rough estimate on what it will take to build the product in
terms of people-years. You will probably meet some resistance
with this. No engineering manager wants to sign up to a
schedule for a product that is not well defined.
THE PREPARATION
You need to prepare all the slides in advance of the meeting.This is
necessary for the following reasons:
*Engineering needs to provide resource estimates.
*Engineers may have great ideas on a particular implementation of a
product or even a good target market for the product.
*Engineers may have strong opinions on a given project.
It is best to understand those before trying to get the project approved.
•Project Name
•Product Description
•Recommendation
•Market Justification
•Resource Projection
THE DECISION
•If the product fits into the company strategy, but the resources
are unavailable to work on it, it may be a good idea to put it on
hold until some determined future time.
•The decision should take into account the following criteria
•Does the project fit into the company's long term strategy?
•Does the target market for the project align with the company
strategy?
•Will there be sufficient revenue from the product to justify the
work required?
•If there is not sufficient revenue, are there other highly
compelling reasons to justify the work?
•Are the resources available to do the work?
•If the resources are not available, should this project take
precedence over another?
THANK YOU