Master production schedule

Master Production Schedule (MPS). MPS is part of a closed-loop planning system. The essence of MPS is to ensure that sales planning and production planning are consistent with the specified needs (what is needed, how much is needed and when it is needed) and the resources used. MPS takes into account business planning and sales planning and coordinates production planning with them. It looks at what is sold and what can be manufactured, which creates an appropriate “master production schedule” for the shop floor and adjusts this plan with rough capacity data until the load is balanced. Both the APS system and the MRP system have the ability to prepare master plans.

Simply put, MPS is a plan that determines the production quantity of each specific final product in each specific time period; sometimes components may be considered first, and then the final assembly plan is released. The final product here refers to the finished product that is finally completed and shipped out of the factory for the enterprise. It must be specific to the product variety and model. The specific time period here is usually in weeks. In some cases, it can also be days, ten days, or months. The master production plan specifies in detail what to produce and when it should be produced. It is an independent demand plan. Based on customer contracts and market forecasts, the master production plan specifies the product series in the business plan or production outline, making it the main basis for developing material requirements planning, and plays a connecting role in the transition from comprehensive plans to specific plans.

The master production schedule is a time-phased method to plan the quantity and delivery date of the final products that the company will produce. The master production schedule is an advance production plan that gives the production quantities of a specific item or product in each planning period. This is an actual detailed manufacturing plan. This plan seeks to consider every possible manufacturing requirement.
The master production plan is an important planning level of MRPⅡ. Roughly speaking, the master production plan is a description of “what will be produced.” It specifies the product series in the sales and operation plan based on customer contracts and forecasts, determines the factory products, and makes it an unfolded MRP and CRP ( Detailed planning) is the main basis for calculations. It serves as a link between the previous and the following and serves as a transition from macro-plan to micro-plan.
The master production schedule is a key link in the planning system. An effective master production plan is a commitment of production to customer needs. It makes full use of corporate resources, coordinates production and the market, and achieves corporate business goals expressed in the production plan outline. The master production plan plays the role of the “leading” module in plan management, which determines the goals of all subsequent planning and manufacturing activities. In the short term, it serves as the basis for material requirements planning, parts production planning, ordering priority and short-term capacity demand planning. In the long term, it will be used as a basis for estimating the factory’s production capacity, warehousing capacity, technical personnel, funds and other resource needs.
Why do we need to have a master production plan first and then formulate a material requirements plan based on the master production plan? Isn’t it possible to formulate material requirements planning directly based on sales forecasts and customer orders? The reason for such questions and thoughts lies in the lack of understanding of the MRP planning method. In a nutshell: The planning method of MRP is to track requirements. If you run MRP directly against forecast and customer order demand, the resulting plan will exactly match the forecast and order demand in quantity and timing. However, forecasts and customer orders are unstable and unbalanced. If they are used directly to arrange production, sometimes the task cannot be completed despite working overtime, and sometimes the equipment is idle, leaving many people without work. This will bring disaster to the enterprise. consequences, and the enterprise’s production capacity and other resources are limited, so such an arrangement is not always possible.
In addition, at the level of the master production plan, through manual intervention and balanced arrangements, the master production plan volume matches the forecast and customer orders in time within a period of time, instead of pursuing matching demand at every specific moment. The result is a stable, balanced plan. Since the master production plan at the product or final project (independent demand items) level is stable and balanced, the resulting material requirements plan for dependent demand items will also be stable and balanced. Therefore, the purpose of formulating a master production plan is to obtain a stable and balanced production plan.

In PlanMateAPS, plans are divided into main plans (long-term plans) and detailed plans. Sales order scheduling can be used for master planning, order delivery evaluation, and production capacity analysis. APS expands the demand for all parts based on BOM and automatically schedules according to limited production capacity to determine the production and delivery time of the order. It can also generate material requirements planning.