Operations Planning Essay

PLANNING AND SCHEDULING OPERATIONS

1.0 Introduction

In business, operation planning and scheduling play a very important role to manage supply chain effectively. The effectiveness and efficiency of the operations is the key of successful of a company. To meet the forecasted demand, a firm must design or develop a perfect plan to supply the resources needed. Operations planning and scheduling is a process to ensure that the demand and supply plan are in the balance, from aggregate level to short term scheduling level. As lying at the core of supply chain integration, operation planning and scheduling have to determine whether which plans are tend to make up and make down the supply chain of an organization, from suppliers deliveries to customers

First is the sales and operation plan (S&OP). Sales and operation plan is a plan of future aggregate resource levels that supply is in balance with demand.it states a company’s or department’s production rates, workforce level, and inventory holdings that are consistent with demand forecasts and capacity constraints. The sales and operations plan is a time phase. In other words, it means that it is projected for several time periods into future such as months or quarters. Next is the aggregate plan. It can be said that in another term for sales and operation plan. Production plan also is one of the types of operations planning and scheduling. It is a plan that focuses on manufacturing firm that centres with production rates and inventory holding. Besides, the others type of plan is staffing plan. This type of plan is concern about the staffing and others human resource related factors in a service firm. Furthermore, resource plan is another type of plan of operation planning and scheduling.it is an intermediate step in planning process that lies between sales and operation planning and scheduling. This plan is used to determine the requirement of materials and other resources on more detailed level than sales and operation plan. Last is schedule which allocates resources over shorter time horizon to accomplish a specific

Normally, operation planning is focusing on the general course of action of company and concern about the goals and objectives of company. They seldom focus in the details to prevent getting bogged down. Therefore, the company must aggregate in the beginning and then use the targets and resources from plan to develop an effective and good schedule. Ordinarily, there are three dimensions that a company should be considered during the aggregation performance. For instance, there are product families, workforce, and time. Product families, which is a group of products or services that have similar demand requirements and common process, labours, and materials requirements, is related to market grouping. To avoid too many details in planning process, the company can aggregate all of the products and services into a broad families based on theirs similarity. In this stage, measurements such as common and relevant measurement can be used. The company not only can aggregate the products or services while preparing the sales and operations plan, but also can aggregate theirs workforce by according to theirs flexibility. In addition, the time of the sales and operation plan also is the factor that concerned by the company. An adjustment usually is made monthly or quarterly in purpose to avoid the expense and disruptive effect that caused by frequent changes in output rates and workforce. This can