Inventory Production Planning or simply Planning is the systemized way of scheduling the production of Nursery and Greenhouse crops. IPP will keep tack of the location a crop has been started and when the Plan Available date has the crop being sellable.
This application has many moving parts with many routines to help your company produce finished crops on time and keep track of the actual vs standard production times.
Production Planning begins with a concept called a cycle. A cycle is a from and to inventory item with a time delay to allow the plant to properly root and grow to fill the next size container.
Cycles contain all the needed information to move a plant to the next size. It could be a #1 to #3 as in this example or a #1 to #5 or any combination of from and to items of the same plant. It also may make a difference when the plant is transferred. This is called a growth code. A day today may not be equivalent to a day later in the year. There can be a significant difference in growth potential. To allow for that difference we invented the Growth Code.
This chart illustrates a plant that is subject to sun, water or temperature variations. When planted some times of year the growing days might equal the actual days other times the effective days could be quite a bit less. This provides the necessary flexibility and predictability in planning how long a crop will need to reach maturity. Growth factors is one of the unique features of ActiveApplications Production Planning.
The next terminology to digest is the production series. A production series is the begin to end production steps for a particular plant variety.
A series is the begin to end cycle to cycle an item could be passed through to get the largest size. A series will indicate how many of the smallest item size of an item is needed today to produce the correct number of largest size items in what could be years from now. Too many small size items could result in too many of the intermediate sizes to sell. Too few smallest item sizes could result in a lack of large size and most profitable items to sell years from now.
Any mistakes in the number of smallest size produced may require the purchase of additional intermediate items in the future. Your nursery or greenhouse needs this planning tool to help manage future production issues.
To say that the process is complicated is an understatement. Making fewer mistakes in inventory levels today can maximize future profits.
Not that we need more terms for this complicated process but at least one more is required. A production schedule is the total combination of a crops needed for a period of time. There can be a few or a lot of crops needed to fill the production schedule. Not all items can be produced at the ideal time. Crew availability or physical space or lack of equipment could be the limiting factors in meeting the production schedule at the ideal time so the schedule needs to be spread out over time. Meeting production schedule goals for a year will insure crops of all sizes in future years.
As crops are started the future required crops will be reduced. The crop is the base inventory keeping unit. It is what applies the schedule to the real location inventory. You control the inventory to make sure schedule goals are met.
A production forecast is a combination of the items already in production with those that need to be produced. This is the summary working document. The production Forecast can be reduced to a spread sheet through this program. This program or the spread sheet can be updated to minimize the needed updating. Although the size of the data is difficult to present in this two dimensional presentation it is presented here. Create the spread sheet with this program.
Open the spread sheet to see the results
This spread sheet is large so the following is the continuation although there are many more columns.
Once updated in Excel it can be imported back into AA to update the tables. This is a powerful way your can be productive when implementing a very complicated process.
Production planning is the tool you need to control the whole growing process. Eventually the theory needs to be applied to your inventory locations
The result when plan steps are execute is inventory that is reserved until the plan is complete. Based on the Plan Available date inventory can be selected to match orders or placed on catalog availability lists.
Production planning is a tool your growing operation needs. Contact your representative to see it for yourself.