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Production Planner

​Production planning is the planning of production and manufacturing modules in a company or industry. It utilizes the resource allocation of activities of employees, materials and production capacity, in order to serve different customers.[1]

Different types of production methods, such as single item manufacturing, batch production, mass production, continuous production etc. have their own type of production planning. Production planning can be combined with production control into production planning and control, or it can be combined with enterprise resource planning.

Production planning is the future of production. It can help in efficient manufacturing or setting up of a production site by facilitating required needs.[2] A production plan is made periodically for a specific time period, called the planning horizon. It can comprise the following activities:

Determination of the required product mix and factory load to satisfy customers needs.[3]

Matching the required level of production to the existing resources.[4]

Scheduling and choosing the actual work to be started in the manufacturing facility"[1]

Setting up and delivering production orders to production facilities.[5]

In order to develop production plans, the production planner or production planning department needs to work closely together with the marketing department and sales department. They can provide sales forecasts, or a listing of customer orders."[6] The "work is usually selected from a variety of product types which may require different resources and serve different customers. Therefore, the selection must optimize customer-independent performance measures such as cycle time and customer-dependent performance measures such as on-time delivery."[1]

A critical factor in production planning is "the accurate estimation of the productive capacity of available resources, yet this is one of the most difficult tasks to perform well".[7] Production planning should always take "into account material availability, resource availability and knowledge of future demand".[5]

​Norfolk (/ˈnɔːrfək/) is a county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the northwest, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea and to the northwest, The Wash. The county town is the city of Norwich. With an area of 2,074 square miles (5,370 km2) and a population of 859,400, Norfolk is a largely rural county with a population density of 401 per square mile (155 per km2). Of the county's population, 40% live in four major built up areas: Norwich (213,000), Great Yarmouth (63,000), King's Lynn (46,000) and Thetford (25,000).[4]

The Broads is a network of rivers and lakes in the east of the county, extending south into Suffolk. The area is not a national park[5] although it is marketed as such. It has similar status to a national park, and is protected by the Broads Authority.[6]