Production planning process flowchart template
Production planning process flowchart: demand plan to master schedule, a capacity check with overtime and subcontract routes, MRP, release and re-planning.
How it works
Rename the lanes to your real roles
Replace Demand planning, Production planner, Materials / Purchasing, Production and Quality with the functions you genuinely have. If the planner also raises the requisitions, merge those lanes rather than drawing a handoff that never happens. Give a subcontractor its own lane only if you actively manage one, so the boundary of your control is visible.
State how you measure available capacity
Write down the basis on the capacity step: hours per line per shift, net of planned maintenance, changeovers and normal downtime. Note whether you are doing a rough-cut check against a few key work centres or a full capacity requirements calculation against routings, because the two give different answers and take very different effort to maintain.
Set the planning horizon and the freeze point
Record how far ahead the master schedule is built, and how close to the build date it is frozen. Then name who may change a frozen order and what they have to do to get it moved. A schedule with no freeze point is re-planned constantly and trusted by nobody.
Write your sequencing rule onto the chart
Annotate the sequencing step with the rule you actually apply, for example due date first, then grouped by changeover family or by colour, respecting minimum batch sizes. Undocumented sequencing is how the schedule becomes one planner's private knowledge and stops when they are on leave.
Decide who may close a capacity gap, and up to what cost
Overtime and subcontract buy capacity with money; re-phasing spends the customer's delivery date instead. Put the approval limits and the named roles on the 'How to close the gap?' branches, and say who tells sales when a date moves, because that is the conversation the step exists to force.
Walk it against a real week, including one that went wrong
Follow two or three live orders through the chart, then take a breakdown or a material shortage from the last month and follow that through the re-planning loop. Anything people do that is not drawn, or drawn but skipped, is the finding worth acting on before you publish the chart as a procedure.
Frequently asked questions
What are the steps in the production planning process?
Receive the demand plan, reconcile forecast with firm orders, and build the master production schedule. Calculate capacity requirements against available lines and shifts and decide whether capacity is sufficient, closing any gap with overtime, subcontract or a re-phase. Run material requirements planning, raise purchase requisitions for shortfalls, then create and sequence production orders and release works orders to the shop floor. Materials are issued, the job is manufactured, quality is confirmed and scrap recorded, progress is monitored, and anything off plan goes back through re-planning. The chart above shows all of it across five lanes.
What is the difference between production planning and production scheduling?
Planning decides what to make and how much over a horizon, and whether capacity and materials will support it. Scheduling decides the order and timing of that work on specific lines, machines and shifts. In this chart the planning half runs from the demand plan through the capacity check and the MRP run; scheduling starts at 'Create and sequence production orders' and ends when works orders are released. They are usually the same person's job in a smaller plant, which is exactly why the boundary is worth drawing.
Where does MRP fit, and what does it need to work?
Material requirements planning takes the master production schedule and explodes it through bills of material to net requirements by date, offsetting each one by its lead time. It needs accurate bills of material and routings, current on-hand and allocated stock, open purchase and works orders, and realistic supplier lead times. When an MRP output looks wrong, the cause is nearly always one of those inputs rather than the calculation, so fix the master data before overriding the plan.
How should breakdowns and material shortages be handled?
As a loop in the process, not an exception to it. Monitoring against the plan feeds a 'Schedule still achievable?' gate, and anything that is not achievable goes to re-planning, which returns to the capacity calculation so the knock-on effect on other orders is seen rather than discovered later. Agree in advance who may re-plan, how quickly the revised dates are communicated, and which customer commitments are protected when orders have to be resequenced.
Does this template help with ISO 9001?
It gives you a documented starting point, which is not the same as compliance. The relevant clause is 8.1, operational planning and control, which expects an organisation to plan and control the processes needed to meet product requirements, including determining resources and criteria and keeping documented information sufficient to show the processes were carried out as planned. This chart can describe that planning, but you still need the underlying records, and an auditor will want evidence that the plant works the way the chart says.