To support the need to reduce cost and time to market, greater emphasis is needed to control shop floor activities. Well-organized manufacturing process, resulting elimination of bottleneck and waste, necessitates greater reliance upon flexible and user friendly production planning and control system. The planning engine of an ERP system, through closed loop MRP/MRP II capability, generates planned production orders, based on the forecasted time phased demand, in respective monthly/weekly time buckets.

After confirmation, full functional production orders, with adjustable routing and components, states what quantity of product should be manufactured and its scheduled date of production. While generating the production order, the system takes cognizance of the number of hours needed for the order and capacity of machines and work centers and availability of materials and components.

Functionalities of production module: Some of the basic functionalities are:

1. Production order control.
2. Production order planning.
3. Production order statistics.
4. Production order subcontracting (to be discussed later).
5. Production material issues (to be discussed later).

Linking to other modules: Production planning and control is a highly integrated executable module. It receives planned production orders from the planning engine. It receives details of product structure from BOM and details of operations needed for a manufactured item from Routing. It receives cost accounting data from cost accounting module. The inventory module deals with issue of goods to production orders and quality management checks the quality of goods produced.

Production order control: This functionality is used to carry out all aspects of a production order under different production environment such as repetitive manufacturing, job shop manufacturing, and assembly line sequencing. The functionality enables user to transfer planned order and create manual production order, print production order documents containing details of required components and operations, release order to shop floor for execution and record status of the order such as planned, released, active and completed. Finally, the production order is closed when final outcome of cost, material issued and hours worked are posted to the production order.

When a production order is created, the system automatically calculates estimated material (from BOM) and estimated hour (from routing) for executing the order. The system may adopt forward planning when production start date is used for calculating delivery date. The system may also adopt backward planning when production start date can be derived from the delivery date and the order lead-time of the item.

Production order planning: This functionality helps in changing or rescheduling operation of a production order, as per details indicated below:

• Changing the operations (tasks).
• Changing sequence of operations (routing) - to alter the structure of the routing.
• Changing order sequence (dates and scheduling on a work center).
• Changing the content of the order (reference dates) - for replanning the order.
• Changing material belonging to the order (estimated materials.

Production order Statistics: This functionality provides information regarding actual cost and estimated cost of production orders, both in respect of materials consumed and hours spent. This statistical information helps in better planning and execution of future production orders.