Manufacturing Mastery with Production Planning and Control

Generate ideas through guided brainstorming with a facilitator and recorder, exploring structured, unstructured, and salient types, and follow seven steps from defining objectives to follow-up.

Explore the theory of constraints and how to identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate, and find the next bottleneck to maximize output in manufacturing and operations.

Organize brainstormed ideas by similarity with an affinity diagram. Assign header ideas to summarize clusters for material, machine, and management factors in root cause analysis and Six Sigma projects.

Learn how quality function deployment, or the house of quality, translates the voice of customers into engineering features, analyzes relationships, and prioritizes design decisions to meet demand.

Forecasting uses past data to estimate future events and guide inventory, production, and financial decisions, distinguishing itself from prediction and outlining qualitative and quantitative forecast types with Excel templates.

Compare quantitative data-driven forecasting with qualitative methods—expert opinions, polls, and surveys like executive opinion, market survey, sales force approach, and Delphi method.

Explore time series models for quantitative forecasting, including naive forecasts, simple and weighted moving averages, and exponential smoothing with trend projection. Practice with Excel templates to apply these methods.

Learn to forecast demand using a four-week moving average in Excel with the data analysis toolpak, including setting input ranges, enabling analysis tools, and interpreting forecast versus actual sales.

Learn to calculate the weighted moving average in Excel, assign weights to recent sales, ensure they sum to one, and forecast sales using a weighted forecast and charts.

Compare simple averaging with weighted moving average forecasting, and see how assigning more weight to periods closest to the forecast improves accuracy in production planning and control.

Apply trend projection analysis to forecast sales and demand using scatterplots, trend lines, and polynomial models in Excel, generating week-by-week forecasts and assessing model fit with R-squared.

Gain value through lean practices, quality management, and continuous improvement while learning to address confusions, track progress, and access support channels for course success.

Explore facility layout and planning, identifying how a good layout minimizes material handling cost and movement of people and material, reduces accidents, and enhances resource utilization and morale.

Optimize the layout by sequencing operations and enhancing space and resources flexibility. Minimize travel, boost safety and satisfaction, reduce bottlenecks, and improve productivity.

Explore four main manufacturing layouts—product layout, process layout, fixed position layout, and combination layout—and examine their uses, advantages, and limitations in continuous and flexible production settings.

Understand how flow pattern moves material from start to final product, and how an economical floor plan enables high-quality, cost-effective material flow in lean manufacturing.

Master material flow types in manufacturing, including horizontal, vertical, u-shaped, zigzag, and oval flows with rotary table handling. Learn how space, supervision, and process integration shape production planning and control.

Analyze process selection across four manufacturing types—assembly line, continuous flow, batch flow, and job shop—and how volume, variety, and layout decide product versus process layouts.

Explore flowcharts and process mapping to break complex operations into step-by-step sequences, understand their inputs and functions, and study top-down deployment project mappings.

Enable process mapping to expose visibility into employees' roles and interdepartmental collaboration while identifying risks and eliminating non-value-added steps.

Learn to draw a swimlane map for production, identifying steps, departments, and roles, and using symbols like oval for start/end, rectangle for process, and diamond for decisions.

Explore a swimlane map case study of manufacturing flow, detailing raw materials store, quality control, and packaging departments, with hands offs, loops, and quality checks to optimize production.

Value stream mapping is a lean, visual tool that maps material and information flow to reveal bottlenecks, waste, value from the customer perspective, and value-adding versus non-value-adding activities.

Identify the symbols in value stream mapping, including process, transport, and information icons. Interpret data like cycle time, inventory triangles, safety stock, and data boxes to analyze value streams.

Download the value stream map Excel template from bonus and drag symbols onto the map to map values; adopt a companion tool for drawing value stream maps and downtime calculations.

Learn how to construct a master production schedule by balancing forecast demand, on-hand inventory, and customer orders within an eight-week rolling horizon, using inputs, outputs, and available-to-promise calculations.

Compare MRP 1, MRP 2, and ERP by data volume and complexity, from material ordering to finances, illustrated with a cosmetic case study.

Define capacity as the output rate of machines and resources in manufacturing and service settings. Learn how capacity planning uses this capacity to meet demand by aligning resources.

Discover how to calculate capacity utilization rate by comparing capacity use to base operating capacity; learn capacity efficiency, capacity load, and capacity load percentage for production planning and control.

Forecast demand for automation, determine present capacity and manpower, develop options such as new machinery, overtime, or contract manufacturing, and select the best plan to change capacity.

Capacity planning targets the base operating level to deliver value, quality, speed, and competitive prices. Economies of scale lower unit costs with production, while diseconomies arise from underutilization and overutilization.

Apply the machine requirements formula to compute total machines: (standard time times demand) divided by (machine capacity times utilization), with 15 minutes, 100,000 units, 5,000 hours, and 80% utilization.

Adopt total productive maintenance as a company-wide teamwork philosophy involving all employees to boost productivity and reduce costs through continuous improvement.

Explore total productive maintenance and its eight pillars in automotive manufacturing, showing how autonomous, preventive, and quality maintenance boost overall equipment effectiveness and drive continuous improvement.

Explore a simulated case to define takt time, using 8 hours and a 30-minute break to meet a daily production requirement of 100 units at 4.5 minutes per unit.

Learn how a kanban board manages a backlog by selecting three priority items and moving their cards from in-process to in-review and finally done, using color-coded cards.

Explore how a pull system and kanban signals synchronize pizza production with customer demand, linking ingredients, replenishment from the freezer, and on-counter packaging.