Need for Production Planning and Control

The present techno-economic scenario of India emphasize on competitiveness in manufacturing. Indian industries have to streamline the production activities and attain the maximum utilisation of firms’ resources to enhance the productivity. Production planning and control serves as a useful tool to coordinate the activities of the production system by proper planning and control system. Production system can be compared to the nervous system with PPC as a brain. Production planning and control is needed to achieve:

1. Effective utilisation of firms’ resources.
2. To achieve the production objectives with respect to quality, quantity, cost and timeliness of delivery.
3. To obtain the uninterrupted production flow in order to meet customers varied demand with respect to quality and committed delivery schedule.
4. To help the company to supply good quality products to the customer on the continuous basis at competitive rates.

Production planning is a pre-production activity. It is the pre-determination of manufacturing requirements such as manpower, materials, machines and manufacturing process.

Ray wild defines “Production planning is the determination, acquisition and arrangement of all facilities necessary for future production of products. ” It represents the design of production system. Apart from planning the resources, it is going to organize the production.

Based on the estimated demand for company’s products, it is going to establish the production programme to meet the targets set using the various resources.

Production Control

Inspite of planning to the minute details, most of the time it is not possible to achieve production 100 per cent as per the plan. There may be innumerable factors which affect the production system and because of which there is a deviation from the actual plan. Some of the factors that affect are:

1. Non-availability of materials (due to shortage, etc.);
2. Plant, equipment and machine breakdown;
3. Changes in demand and rush orders;
4. Absenteeism of workers; and
5. Lack of coordination and communication between various functional areas of business.

Thus, if there is a deviation between actual production and planned production, the control function comes into action. Production control through control mechanism tries to take corrective action to match the planned and actual production. Thus, production control reviews the progress of the work, and takes corrective steps in order to ensure that programmed production takes place. The essential steps in control activity are:

1. Initiating the production,
2. Progressing, and
3. Corrective action based upon the feedback and reporting back to the production planning.

Source: KumarAnil, Suresh N. (2009), Production and operations management, New Age International Pvt Ltd; 2nd Ed. edition.