Functions of Production Planning and Control (PPC) Department in Apparel Manufacturing

The garment manufacturing process is considered a complex one. Starting from preproduction activities to material planning to material sourcing from various vendors and allocating internal production processes to executing the orders required a detailed planning. To run the apparel manufactuirng business, company management must consider setting up the production planning department in their production plants. Nowadays, with the help of tech solutions production planning, activity scheduling and the follow up of the processes in done in better way.

In the context of the apparel manufacturing, primary roles of the Production Planning and Control (PPC) department has been listed below. I have written an overview of the PPC tasks. To know details about each task read related articles.

1. Task and Process Scheduling:

The PPC team need to prepare and the Time and action calendar for the new orders for the season. Sechduling is done for each order from order receiving to shipment. The job schedule contains list of tasks to be processed for the styles. 

Against each task production planner mentions start date of a task and planned completion date for that task. Name of responsible person (department) for the job is being listed. For example, scheduling planned cut date (PCD), line loading date etc.

They alos include events and activiites that need to be followed up by a specific date and period. So, this task can be also called as TNA preparation. Check the TNA templates and TNA preparation method.

2. Material Resource Planning (Inventory):

Preparation of material requirement sheet according to approve garment samples and buyer specification sheet. Material consumption (fabric, thread, button, and twill tape) is calculated and estimated cost of each material. In absense of PPC department, production merchandisers takes care of preparing MRP. During material resouce planning they prepare indent of each items (BOM) and collect quotes from the supplier before planning an order with the raw material supplying vendors. They need approval for the prices from an authorised person.  

The planning team needs to contact the vendors of all the different types of material to be purchased for the production orders. 

3. Loading production:

After the preparation activities, their major task is production scheduling and line planning. After booking of the production orders, planner needs to identify which style to be loaded to the production line and how much quantity to be loaded.

4. Process selection and planning:

They need to anlyse the production processes thorughly. Identify which all processes involved for the order. You may know differnet order will follow different routes. Processes involved in a shirt making does no match with the processes involved in making a Jacket. 

A defined number of processes needed to complete an order. And that varies style to style. According to the order (customer) requirement PPC department selects processes for the orders. Sometimes extra processes are eliminated to reduce the cost of production. Planning team are suggested to follow standard processes for the order by product catgories for better result in terms of production delivery and qulity production. 

5. Facility Location:

Where a company has multiple factories (facilities) for production and factories are set for a specific product, planner needs to identify which facility will be most suitable for new orders. Sometimes there may be a capacity shortage in a factory, in that case, planner need to decide which facility will be selected for that orders.

6. Estimating quantity and costs of production:

Planner estimate daily production (units) according to the styles work content. With the estimated production figure, production runs and manpower involvement planner also estimate production cost per pieces.

7. Capacity Planning:

PPC department plays a major role during order booking. They decide (suggest) how much order they should accept according to their production capacity. Allocating of total capacity or deciding how much capacity to be used for an order out of total factory capacity. Regularly updating factories current capacity (production capacity).

To know more about capacity planning read the article - How to calculate the production capacity of a factory

8. Line Planning:

Preparing detailed line planning with daily production target for the production line. Most cases line planning is made after discussing with the production team and Industrial engineers.

Also Read - What is Line Planning?

9. Follow up and execution:

Whatever plan is made is executed by PPC department. PPC department keeps close look whether everything is progressing according the plan. Chasing other department heads on a daily basis to keep plan on track. They update order wise completed tasks on the Time & action Calendar. When they found something is going to be late they expedite and create an alarm about the delay.

Read my book on PPC in apparel manufacturing Check the book purchase options here

Conclusion

If you have production planning department in your company, you should develop SOP of the department. Production planning and control department is one of the important department for the apparel manufacturing company. You can read articles published on this website to learn more about production processes and production planning tasks.