Production Planning & Scheduling – Internal Audit Guide

I’m getting back to blogging after quite some time now as I have been occupied with a lot of personal commitments. To see 400 odd unique users to the websites even when I haven’t been posting anything was something I was surprised to learn and decided to start writing again.

One of my personal favourite – Production process of Manufacturing Units. Simply because of the beauty at which the Humans engineered processes to bring an output of a raw input. If you were inclined towards science during school, then you’d be able to relate to quite a lot of things you learnt from then. Now let’s get into the Internal audit of production planning & scheduling aspect of the Production process.

It is key to understand the business objectives & the environmental controls associated with the production process before starting to list out the potential risks in the process. Here are the key planning & scheduling objectives:

Production without a concrete plan is destined to fail. Production planning involves taking stock of multiple dependent variables like the projected sales plan, raw material procurement planning, packing material availability, availability of freight services to ship the output at the expected time defined by the customers. It is important to look at the production parameters defined, whether they have been sufficiently backed by other plans. Let us understand if the production plan is based on adequate and accurate planning parameters:

Now that the parameters have been verified for it’s adequacy and accuracy. Here is a simple Cheat sheet for the rest of the process as part of the production planning & scheduling:

In conclusion, production planning process has to be understood in depth in order to further audit production processing, Yield Management, Process quality, labelling & packing, plant maintenance which will be discussed in detail in the future articles. Thanks for reading !