ERP/MRPII & Closed-Loop Planning: Facility planning, resource planning, aggregate capacity planning, and production planning are all elements of long-range planning. Each encompasses the degree of detail appropriate to its planning horizon and to the organization's environment and objectives. Capacity planning at all levels in the capacity planning hierarchy is connected to measures of product and service outputs. These measures usually are stated in both physical and monetary units…More Info...

Managing Uncertainty & Keeping Promises: The planning and control functions required for production and inventory management (PIM) are briefly delineated in this eBook. Also included is a description of various production and distribution environments that may be relevant to every manufacturing company's needs. This material is provided to better define the methods used, or planned to be used, by various teams, traditional examples are provided below for team members to review and adapt as needed for their purposes. Many examples may not be oriented to your company products. But a team that reviews and comes to consensus about how a tool or framework can be applied to resolve production or development problems will have gained a lot from the effort! More Info...

Master Scheduling: The sections entitled: Uncertainty & Promises and Closed-Loop Planning described production planning and resource requirements planning, which are aggregate plans of production and capacity generally taking one to ten years to complete execution. These plans combine (aggregate) similar products into product groups, combine demand into monthly totals, and often group personnel requirements across departments. The time comes when individual products and services must be scheduled at specific work centers. This is accomplished by master scheduling---producing a plan to manufacture specific items or provide specific services within a given time period...More Info...

Rough Cut Capacity Planning: Three approaches to rough cut capacity planning are examined. The least detailed, the capacity planning using overall factors (CPOF) approach, is quickly computed but is insensitive to shifts in product mix. A second approach, bill of labor, involves multiplying two matrices, the bill of labor and the master production schedule. This approach picks up shifts in product mix, but does not consider lead-time offsets. The third approach, resource profile, takes lead-time offsets into account... More Info...

Production Activity Control (PAC) is concerned with converting plans into action, reporting the results achieved, and revising plans and actions as required achieving desired results. Thus, PAC converts plans into action by providing the required direction. This requires the appropriate prior master planning of orders, work force personnel, materials, and capacity requirements. While there are better methods available via JIT and other strategies, PAC is an essential system for managing in relation to specific orders that must be properly launched, when material and labor resources, and equipment are properly timed to be delivered or allocated for the completion of those orders…More Info...

Just-In-Time Planning (JIT) presentations often employ the analogy of a stream when describing proper inventory management. Well-managed systems achieve a flow of inventory from raw material to the customer like a smooth river, unimpeded by shoals of scrap or machine breakdown or other problems. This concept did not originate with the Japanese. Henry Ford's River Rouge plant regularly converted iron ore into a Model T in four days. However, in recent years, especially the 1970s, American business has not improved its manufacturing capability quickly enough to maintain a competitive position in cost or quality or market responsiveness or flexibility…More Info...

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a philosophy that has a lot in common with Just-in-Time but also has some critical differences. There are two basic differences. The first is that the theory of constraints accepts the existence of a constraint, at least temporarily, and focuses the improvement effort on the constraint and related workstations. The second is that the theory of constraints uses overlapped production (transfer batch not equal to the process batch) to schedule work through a batch production environment, while Just-in-Time provides no scheduling mechanism for a batch environment. Thus, the theory of constraints scheduling approach has wider applicability than Just-in-Time (although Just-in-Time's continuous improvement philosophy and quality emphasis clearly is applicable to batch production environments)…More Info...

Organizational Development & Mentorship: A Mentor is, using the simplest definition, a teacher. Some teachers are mentors. Others are not. But all mentors have gone beyond simply teaching. Most of us have experienced being taught by teachers who had a good grasp of the material being taught. The same teacher might have taught the subject well, in a style easily accessible to us. Perhaps that teacher even inspired us in some way. There are a few key ideas that set mentoring apart from teaching. A teacher who knows the subject thoroughly, inspires us by talk and example, who encourages our making of creative mistakes, who truly wants us to succeed and does not feel threatened by our skills, ability and success, that teacher is a mentor. A mentor is also a leader. A mentor is a leader who nurtures our learning experience, respects our humanness and adulthood, and fiercely guards the process of the teaching/learning experience...More Info...