Production planning tools for small and medium business

Computer-based production planning tools will be helpful to administrators of any organization which undertakes its business activities in area of producing certain goods or services. Production planning workflow is about projecting the future quantity and quality of products to produce over a specific time horizon, so production planning programs should help in building production timeline and setting volumes of production being explained in terms of products’ quality and quantity. Each company has its own production planning system that determines methodology of decision-making in order to meet different strategic factors.

As far as this is a complex cross-functional process which is based on factors such as amount of products available in company’s inventory, orders placed by customers, forecasted demand and other important things, it is necessary to map out company priorities correctly. For this purpose special production planning hierarchy of different managers is engaged into collecting and processing essential information to support this strategic process of decision-making. In order of better facilitating and coordinating their efforts, you can use special production planning tools that can be the following:

• Production planning spreadsheet – sharable electronic list which holds items representing products along with their amounts being kept in the company’s inventory, as well as production plan represented as a list of time-specified and amount-specified deliverables (this can be called a production planning worksheet).
• Production planning report – this is a way to track performance of production objectives, or in other words to check if certain volume of products was produced on certain date as planned, or this objective was failed.

• Production planning chart – this is a tool which makes it easier to understand comparison between planned and actual parameters through a visual representation, for example you can use Pie diagram to see the share taken by each product type in company inventory, or you can use Column chart to see if actual production results meet planned ones. 

Let’s consider specific example of production planning tools – it is called VIP Task Manager. This is client-server software which allows multiple people to collaborate at shared tasks in real-time. With a help of this software, the manager can assign tasks to his employees and control how they are completing their work. This tool features a production planning table (Task List) which can be used to plan working tasks for every person in a team, as well as to plan production objectives in terms of volumes, time, costs etc. With a help of this multi-user tool you can share production planning notes for explaining detailed production requirements. Every user is free to create his own production planning layout of interface to get the best view for his business needs.