Creating a production schedule

After determining your demand goal, you break that sales goal down into a master

production schedule (MPS). In other words, building the MPS is how you to decide

what you’ll need to make each day to meet the MDS goal. Creating an MPS forces

you to look more closely at the materials you need and when you need them. It

also drives you to look at the people and equipment you have available to make

your products.

As you build your MPS, you begin to uncover production constraints, which are bot-

tlenecks or problems that may interfere with production. You may not be able to

order as much of the raw materials as you want because your suppliers don’t have

enough capacity, for example. Or perhaps your manufacturing equipment can’t

produce the materials quickly enough. In the example of a fast-food restaurant,

two obvious constraints that the MPS will need to address are space and time. You

have a limited amount of room to store buns, meat patties, and lettuce, and these

ingredients are perishable, so you need to use them before they spoil.

Each constraint that you find requires you to make some decisions. You need to

consider whether you can do something to resolve or eliminate the constraint,

such as find a new supplier or rent extra storage space. Or you may need to change

your production schedule. It’s common to repeat this constraint resolution

process several times, because each time you change the MPS to resolve a con-

straint, you need to check whether that change affects other constraints. In other

words, production scheduling is an iterative process.

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