Principles of Production Planning and Control: Foundations, Methods, and Systems for Managing Factory Schedules, Capacity, and Supply Chains

A manufacturing enterprise is, at its core, a system for turning uncertain demand into certain deliveries. Yet a production schedule that looks perfect on paper often falls apart on the shop floor when nobody can see the arithmetic connecting demand, capacity, and inventory. Much of the available material on production planning sits at one of two extremes: a high-level survey that names the functions of forecasting, scheduling, and inventory management without showing how they are calculated, or a narrow treatment of one method with no view of how it connects to everything around it. The result is a planner who can operate the software but cannot explain why it recommended a given order quantity, why a work center is flagged as overloaded, or why a small demand change cascaded into a major schedule disruption. This book is a complete, single-volume guide to the quantitative foundations of production planning and control, built from first principles and organized around the same planning hierarchy that governs real manufacturing enterprises—from long-range planning down to shop-floor execution. Every method is derived from its assumptions and demonstrated with full worked examples, allowing a single customer order to be traced through demand management, master scheduling, material and capacity planning, sequencing, and execution, with the quantitative relationship at each stage made explicit. Inside, you will learn how to: Calculate and interpret forecast error, and understand how forecast accuracy determines the safety stock and inventory costs a business carries. Build a time-phased master schedule using demand time fences and the greater-of rule, and calculate available-to-promise quantities to make delivery commitments with confidence. Work through a complete multi-level material requirements explosion and compare standard lot-sizing rules—including exact optimization methods—to determine which approach truly minimizes cost. Test schedule feasibility using rough-cut and detailed capacity checks, and apply practical corrective actions when a work center becomes overloaded. Apply proven single- and multi-machine sequencing rules and practical dispatching heuristics, understanding precisely which performance objective each method minimizes. Size safety stock, reorder points, and pull-system signal counts using explicit service-level targets rather than rules of thumb. Understand why work centers operating near full utilization generate disproportionately long queues, and use this insight—together with multi-tier supply chain coordination methods—to establish realistic capacity and inventory buffers. Topics covered include: Demand forecasting and error analysis Aggregate planning and sales-and-operations governance Material requirements planning (MRP) and lot sizing Capacity planning and control Single- and multi-machine scheduling theory Safety stock and single-period inventory models Production leveling and pull-system design Multi-echelon supply chain coordination Waiting-line models for capacity policy Software architecture linking planning and shop-floor execution Written for engineering students seeking a rigorous foundation in production and operations planning, as well as practicing planners and industrial engineers who want to move beyond simply operating planning systems to fully understanding them, this book requires only an undergraduate background in calculus and basic probability. No prior exposure to production planning is assumed. Stop guessing which lever to pull when a plan slips. Build a dependable, first-principles understanding of how modern manufacturing is planned and controlled—from the first demand signal to the finished order.