As an SME business, if you want to thrive with high profit margins and low production costs, it’s important for you to have the right resources to create the final product within a scheduled time frame.
A production planning software lets you achieve all this by integrating your production, purchase, and inventory in one platform. It enables you to track and map your manufacturing process in real-time to achieve desired growth. With a production planning software, you can also optimize your production cycles, to create smooth workflows with reduced costs.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the details of production planning software, its key features and benefits, and the best software you should use for your business. Let’s get started.
What Is Production Planning Software?
A production planning software is an automated tool for businesses to create efficient production strategies, enabling them to streamline processes and maximize production capacity.
This software supports business owners in forecasting production cycle timelines, and predicting potential bottlenecks to ensure manufacturing processes can occur in the best possible manner.
By automating and integrating the end-to-end production process, it empowers companies to achieve cost optimization. A production planning software for small businesses ensures that all workflows and requirements are in place, well before the production cycle begins, ensuring effortless completion.
Key Feature of Production Planning Software
Before you choose the software for your manufacturing needs, you should know all the features that your business requires. Following are some notable features of a production planning software in India.
Forecasting:
One of the key features of production planning and control software is to provide accurate predictions based on past data after assessing recurring patterns. This functionality helps forecast future production demands and gives an estimate of the units to be produced. It also helps to determine the best production strategy you must rely on to optimize your production process as per current inventory levels.
Process planning:
Production planning software comes with a process planning capability which allows you to outline your production cycles in detail. With an overview of your resources, demand, and costs, it helps you to determine how much you need to produce, the required routing steps to be included and how it can be executed with the lowest overhead costs.
Material planning:
Manage product variants and materials from a single platform to ensure your production cycle never runs out of the resources required to create the final product.
Integrations:
A production planning software helps to integrate production planning with other systems, such as accounting, inventory, transactions, and other platforms to enhance production capacity and ease of operations.
Benefits of Production Planning Software
There are many advantages of a production planning and control software, because production automation helps to set up an efficient and cost-effective production system. Let’s look at some important benefits:
Improved cash flow:
A production planning ERP software for manufacturers can help them to deliver orders on time and enable timely follow-ups for improved cash-flows. It also enhances supplier communication and vendor management allowing you to gain greater cost control in the long run.
Efficiency increases:
A manufacturing production planning software can help business owners to run their businesses profitably thanks to its data-driven planning capabilities. It can help you to plan your production faster and more transparently than the manual process, making your business efficient and up-to-date with latest developments.
Inventory management:
Maintain your inventory levels in real time and outline accurate future predictions to know the exact units available in your stock. A production planning tool also alerts you when a product is at a minimum level to avoid stockouts.
Decreased production cost:
With accurate inventory integration and inventory estimation, a production planning software helps SME manufacturers to reduce production costs, and focus on cost optimization, to become more profitable.
TranZact - Best Production Planning Software
With TranZact, you can easily create production processes individually and in bulk, with the help of multilevel bill of material functionalities. TranZact’s production planning module is also closely integrated with its inventory and sales modules for enhanced convenience, transparency and efficiency.
An expert cross-functional integration as this supports staff members to quickly determine which orders need to be taken forward for production. You can also manage various stages of production across planned, pending, work in progress, while also defining routing requirements.
Businesses can also conduct accurate testing procedures with clear identification of how many goods have been tested, and how many have passed. This enables businesses to improve the quality of their orders and keep customers happy always.
Maximize Production Capacity With the Best Cloud-Based Tool
An SME manufacturing business can gain significant value from production cycles that are automated, transparent and cost-effective. The best ERP software for production planning can enable these benefits and more for your business, on a centralized platform, with ease.
TranZact is a free production planning and scheduling software, because it offers a free sign up for its users, with all its base features for free, for an unlimited period of time. Businesses can explore the tool using TranZact’s free forever plan and shift to the advanced features only when they are fully convinced of TranZact’s business value!
In addition to production planning, TranZact offers end-to-end business automation for all core processes across sales, purchase, inventory and production, empowering businesses to maximize their ROI year on year.
FAQs on Production Planning Software
1. What is the best manufacturing scheduling software?
The best manufacturing planning software will offer you advanced capabilities like forecasting, process planning, inventory integration, and real-time production monitoring, all with a cost-effective plan.
If you’re looking for a production management software that enables your business to scale with a powerful production system, you must try TranZact. As a free software for production planning and control, it also offers a free forever sign up with all base features included.
It provides you with all the tools and functionalities your business requires across different functions, to scale your manufacturing process seamlessly.
2. How production planning software works?
Production planning software automates your entire production cycle. It ensures that the raw materials and other resources necessary for executing the production cycle are in place, at the right time.
An efficient software will also provide integration with sales and inventory for improved production transparency.
3. What are production planning techniques?
Production strategy, planning, routing, production scheduling and dispatching are the important production planning techniques that businesses should be aware of.
4. Is there any limitations of production planning and control?
Legacy production planning systems may come with certain limitations of flexibility and time-intensive processes. However, a modern, cloud-based production planning and control software eliminates these limitations of a legacy system.
The only limitation with a modern system for production planning can be identifying a cost-effective tool to suit your business needs, and eliminating the resistance to change amidst organizational members.
5. What are the types of production planning?
There are primarily three types of production planning: batch planning, job planning, and flow and continuous planning.
6. Which is the best ERP software for manufacturers?
Instead of adopting a production planning software that only addresses production concerns, SMEs can adopt an end-to-end business automation software like TranZact.
Along with advanced production planning solutions, it offers comprehensive and highly customizable ERP solutions across sales, purchase, inventory and production verticals to help companies scale faster.
