Training: Production planning in practice

How do you ensure that your production planning not only looks good on paper, but also works on the shop floor? And how do you respond efficiently when unexpected changes disrupt your planning?

During this hands-on course from UGain – UGent Academy for engineers, you’ll discover how production planning and workshop management can reinforce one another. You’ll learn which decisions affect your performance, lead times and delivery reliability – and how to use planning as a practical management tool for your production.

From production planning to execution

Production planning encompasses the methods and techniques that manufacturing companies use to deploy their resources efficiently and deliver products to their customers on time. However, no plan ever goes exactly as envisaged. Changing customer demands, disruptions or other unexpected circumstances mean you have to constantly make adjustments.

That is why planning and production must work closely together. Both need to understand where bottlenecks arise, how they can respond quickly to changes, and what is required to consistently deliver on time.

In practice, however, planning and production still too often operate in isolation, sometimes even based on different information. During this course, you will learn how to bridge that gap and turn planning into a genuine control tool for production.

What will you learn on this course?

You will gain an understanding of how effective production planning is achieved and what adjustments you can make to improve performance and delivery reliability. Among other things, you will discover:

• how production planning works and which factors influence the outcome;
• how to deal with deviations and changing circumstances;
• how planning and production can work together more effectively and in a more synchronised manner;
• how to achieve short and stable lead times;
• how workshop management and planning contribute to smooth operations;
• how to efficiently manage and coordinate staff and work centres;
• how to move from reactive fire-fighting to a stable production environment with a focus on cost optimisation and delivery reliability.

After all, on-time delivery is not the responsibility of planning or production alone. It is a shared responsibility.

Hands-on learning with a virtual production environment

We take a very practical approach to this course. You will work with a simulator of a virtual production environment developed in-house. This allows you to put the concepts you’ve learnt straight into practice.

By adjusting parameters yourself, you’ll see straight away how your choices affect production. You’ll experience how different planning decisions influence performance and discover which actions can help get a production environment back on track.

So it’s not just theory: you’ll see, test and experience for yourself how production planning works in practice.

Focus on workshop management too

Good planning only has an impact if it is carried out efficiently on the shop floor. That is why we also focus on workshop management and planning.

You’ll learn how effective management and coordination of staff and work centres contribute to short and stable lead times. The aim? To create a production environment where you spend less time dealing with ad hoc problems and have more scope to work systematically on cost optimisation and delivery reliability.

The simulator helps you to understand the various techniques quickly and easily. We deliberately keep the approach simple and practical, so that the principles are understandable and applicable to staff in different roles within your production environment.

For whom?

This course is relevant for professionals involved in production planning, production control and workshop management who wish to improve collaboration between planning and production.

Register now

Do you want to align your production planning more closely with what actually happens on the shop floor? During this practical course, discover how to bring planning and production closer together, thereby working towards more stable lead times and higher delivery reliability.

Visit the UGain website for more information and registration.