PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT

Meaning Of Production Management:

The job of coordinating and controlling the activities required to make a
product, typically involving effective control of scheduling, cost, performance,
quality, and waste requirements.

The Objectives and Functions of Production Planning and Control?

Production planning:
Production planning is an activity that is performed before the actual production
process takes place. It involves determining the schedule of production, sequence
of operations, economic batch quantities, and also the dispatching priorities for
sequencing of jobs.
Production control:
Production control is mainly involved in implementing production schedules and is
the corollary to short-term production planning or scheduling. Production control
includes initiating production, dispatching items, progressing and then finally
reporting back to production planning. In general terms, production planning
means planning of the work to be done later and production control refers to
working out or the implementation of the plan.

Objectives of production planning and control

1. To plan production facilities in the best possible manner along with the proper
systematic planning of production activities.
2. Providing men, machines, materials etc. of right quality, quantity and also
providing them at the right time forms a very important factor.
3. To inform, about the difficulties or the various awkward positions expected to
crop up later, to the management beforehand.
Functions:
Production planning functions are hierarchic, having different time horizons
i.e. the time period for some of the functions is in years, while for some of the
functions, it is in weeks or daysso the functions of production planning and
control can be summarized into two categories,
Which are as follows?
1. Regular functions
Involves order preparation, process planning or routing concerns, fixation of
method of manufacture, scheduling, dispatching, progressing, expediting etc.
2. Optimal functions
Involves cost estimation, work measurement, subcontracting, capacity
planning and demand forecasting etc.

Role of a production manager in Operations Management?

The production manager forms a very important and defining part of the
organization structure of an engineering company. The responsibilities of a
production manager can be summarized as follows.
1) Forecasting the requirements of the production in order to achieve the
production target.
2) Making most efficient utilization of the available sources for production.
3) Minimizing throughput time and work in process inventory. This can be
achieved by systematic production planning and also by very efficient execution of
the plans.
4) One of the most important responsibility of a production manager deals with
reducing material handling cost, which generally is achieved by the use of efficient
material handling system and also by using plant layouts which must be developed
in a proper or correct way.
5) Reducing the quality cost with the help of analysis of non conformances on
periodic basis and also by following suitable actions (both corrective and
preventive).
6) Building team spirit among the workmen and also motivating by means of
personal involvement. This task of motivation can also be achieved by designing
and implementing suitable financial incentive schemes.
7) To device accurate methodology involving method study of manufacturing,
along with the other engineering economic principles.
8) Improving the productivity level of the workers on continuous basis by
workmens training and by bringing into use the standards of the performance
derived from work measurement studies etc.