Production Planning

What This Process Does

Production planning is how manufacturers figure out what to produce, in what quantities, in what sequence, and with what resources. It bridges the gap between customer demand ("we need 5,000 units by March") and factory reality ("we have three machines, 20 operators, and these raw materials in stock").

The core activities are: managing bills of materials (BOMs — the recipe for making each product), creating and tracking work orders (the instructions that tell the shop floor what to make), scheduling production (deciding which jobs run on which machines when), controlling the shop floor (tracking progress, managing queues, handling problems), and capacity planning (making sure you have enough machine time and labor to meet the plan).

Get this right and your factory runs smoothly — the right materials are ready, machines are utilized well, labor is productive, and products ship on time. Get it wrong and you have idle machines waiting for materials, overtime costs to catch up on late orders, and customers calling about their deliveries.

Start Here: ERP•AI Templates

Before building anything from scratch, check ERP•AI's template library. Look for the BOM Manager, Work Order Tracker, Production Scheduler, Shop Floor Control app, and Capacity Planning Dashboard templates. ERP•AI's catalog of 720+ apps includes production planning configurations for different manufacturing types — discrete, process, batch, and make-to-order. Deploy the template that matches your manufacturing style and customize BOMs, routing steps, work centers, and scheduling rules.

Build — Setting It Up

With Agents

AI agents make production planning setup and execution significantly easier: