Advanced planning system in small business

Achieving dramatic improvements in productivity, customer satisfaction and profitability result from applying the latest advances in planning and control systems. The paper presents application result of advanced production planning on the small business. 1. ADVANCED PLANNING SYSTEM – APS Traditional planning and scheduling systems (such as Manufacturing resource planning) utilize a stepwise procedure to allocate material and production capacity. This approach is simple but cumbersome, and does not readily adapt to changes in demand, resource capacity or material availability. Materials and capacity are planned separately, and many systems do not consider limited material availability or capacity constraints. Thus, this approach often results in plans that cannot be executed. However, despite attempts to shift to the new system, attempts have not always been successful, which has called for the combination of management philosophy with manufacturing. Unlike previous systems, APS simultaneously plans and schedules production based on available materials, labor and plant capacity. APS has commonly been applied where one or more of the following conditions are present: Make-To-Order (as distinct from make-to-stock) manufacturing, capital-intensive production processes, where plant capacity is constrained, products 'competing' for plant capacity: where many different products are produced in each facility, products that require a large number of components or manufacturing tasks, production necessitates frequent schedule changes which cannot be predicted before the event. University of Žilina, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Industrial Engineering Univerzitna 1, 01026 Žilina, Slovakia, peter.bubenik@fstroj.uniza.sk