SALES AND PROMOTION PLANNING

Sales and Promotion Planning

[Name o f the Writer]

[Name o the Intuition]Sales and Promotion Planning

Introduction

The planning and control of operations is all about understanding and managing demand from customers, providing the required resources to meet that demand and planning and scheduling the use of those resources. That means not only manufacturing meet due dates either for stock or for specific customer orders, but operation planning function also aims to ensure that operations resources are used efficiently. Since in most situations over-provision of resources is costly, whilst under-provision will lead to miss deadlines.

The operation planning has close links with other departments within the organization, e.g. marketing, stock control, costing, personnel, work study department and so on.

As we know the basic input into the production planning function is the forecast by the marketing department of the requirements for the products being provided. On the other hand, marketing may have identified a potential market, e.g. for construction at a price of 5000 pounds, which in terms of production would be quite impossible. So it is important to communicate between marketing and production department.

Production/operation control department will normally predicts material requirements and how long it will take to acquire (or convert) the materials, and then put that information into material management system. The type of material, e.g. raw, work-in-progress and so on, in part indicates how it should be managed, which also establishes how its requirements should be determined.

Information Required For Operations Planning Function

The information has been categorized into 3 sections showed as follows:

At the time of issuing a marketing forecast, marketing department will issue an instruction which will authorize the manufacture of a product or group of products. This is the initial information required for arising production planning and control activities.

Process Choice

Characteristics of project, jobbing, batch, flow, and process production systems, with examples for each.

Project, jobbing, batch, flow and process production are the process types used in manufacturing. The figure below shows the trade off between volume and variety of outputs. In choosing one of these systems, high volume means low variety and high variety means low volume.

Project processes

The essence of project processes is that they are all different, so very low volume and very high variety. The identification of activities and their relationship are uncertain, they can change during the production process itself. Each job has a defined start and finish and the time interval between starting two different jobs is quite long. The resources must be organised exclusively for each project and they are re-allocated after the end of them. Examples of this system are movie production companies: obviously every single movie is different from the others.

Jobbing processes

As for project processes, they deal with high variety and low volume. The difference is that the resources are not organised especially for each project, each product has to share them with many others. Although all the products require the same attention, each will differ in its exact needs. Jobbing requires a general purpose layout and highly skilled ...