Capacity-driven production planning

Traditional material requirements planning systems (MRP) schedule production orders for on-demand items without considering limited capacities of production resources. This article introduces a production planning approach which also incorporates consumption-based items and addresses capacity planning when planned orders are generated. The framework consists of three steps: drafted job list generation, capacity-driven forward scheduling and purchase order generation. Fewer predefined parameters for internally produced items than in MRP are necessary. No lot-sizing policy is applied. Lot-sizes are arranged in a forward scheduling procedure. No predefined constant lead times are used because lead times are also calculated dynamically in the planning procedure. The approach allows a (semi-) automatic finite-capacity production planning and capacity adjustment. The functionality of the approach is illustrated by a simple case study throughout the article.