Learn about what exactly production planning is, why you need it, and how Autodesk Fusion Operations can help.

What is production planning?

Manufacturing is fast changing and staying competitive requires that the production process runs smoothly efficiently and on schedule. Production planning is a critical component of a streamlined manufacturing process. It can boost profitability and customer satisfaction as well as efficiency. It helps companies match output to demand, optimize production processes, and determine how to overcome production problems.

Why is production planning needed?

Whether you’re a Manufacturing Engineer, Production Manager, or Production Planner, having an accurate and comprehensive production schedule is foundational for success in manufacturing. 

Production planning helps companies:

• Calculate the cost of producing a product, including production and labor costs
• Assign adequate financial resources to each stage of production
• Make sure a product reaches the market on-time
• Determine how much time is needed to finalize production and transport their product to distributors
• Confirm the production of the correct amount of required resources

Without modern tools, your production planners are likely spending their time trying to manually balance all of this. Further, they still have to worry about addressing production demands with staffing resources, lack visibility into real-time production data, and have a limited ability to track and monitor production issues.

The end result – unexpected stoppages, drops in productivity, higher costs, longer lead times, decreased customer satisfaction and ultimately lost revenue.

Production planning with Autodesk Fusion Operations

You need tools that can quickly identify bottlenecks and help make better decisions faster.

With a modern production planning tool, like Autodesk Fusion Operations you can quickly pinpoint why all of these issues may be occurring. You’ll gain better visibility into exactly what is happening on the shop floor without having to physically go on the shop floor to manually identify issues. Next-level production capabilities such as the quest for lights-out manufacturing can be achieved. 

People, machines, and raw materials all factor into what your capacity is to produce any given product. Lacking detailed real-time information on each critical variable makes it hard to estimate your production capacity and constrains your growth potential. 

What about paper and spreadsheets? Can they accurately and effectively take into account equipment maintenance and repair, downtime, or analyze and plan equipment placement and space requirements?

Autodesk Fusion Operations digitizes this process. Manufacturing Engineers and Production Managers can stay on top of capacity metrics and easily report out information as needed. 

Data, data, and more data. Data is the foundation of all logical decision-making and can affect your ability to plan and execute. Gaining the ability to report accurate information as needed helps improve cross-department communication, achieve manufacturing goals, and track production KPIs.

Ready to start production planning the right way with Autodesk Fusion Operations? 

Fusion Operations can help you increase manufacturing throughput, optimize your resource planning, and improve manufacturing flexibility. Get started with Autodesk Fusion Operations today to quickly reach your goals of tomorrow.