A household textiles manufacturing company is seeking a detail-oriented and highly organised Production Planner to join their team at their offices in Jacobs, Durban.

The Production Planner acts as the vital link between our Sales team and the Production Coordinators, who ensure the timely and efficient delivery.

Your function is to ensure that you are provided with PPOs from the sales team within the correct lead times, so that you can coordinate the production in time to meet their audit and delivery milestones. 

You will need to be instrumental in requesting that you receive PPOs for a certain time period to ensure that companywide, all divisions and customers are being catered to equally.

This is the push-pull function that is required between departments to ensure that we work in advance, and also have visibility over 8-10 weeks from a production perspective.

Your function is not to simply capture the PPO, however to read and understand the PPO and the product. After analysis of the PPO, ensure the PPO is scheduled on the production line for the correct Due Date / Most Appropriate CMT / Status to be changed to Final Planned / PPOs to be submitted to Packaging dept and Raw materials once a day (unless there are fast tracks).

After PPOs have been planned on the weekly PCP, you are then required to assign an online date to the PPO to provide Cutting room as well as CMTs with a Daily Production Plan (Mon-Fri)

Once this has been done, the actual follow-up function begins whereby you are required to ensure issuing takes place/cutting/sewing/delivery back to Maytex. (Cut units vs Units rec)

Ownership, responsibility and management of Production lines

With regards to the above, you are in-charge of planning a production line. This means the necessary analysis needs to be done in advance to ensure smooth production within that line.

• Planning within Capacity, taking into account quantity / make-up of the product and intricacy.
• Having an idea of whether Raw materials are in stock - info supplied by sales admin/ as well as morning meetings where raw materials are confirmed against the production plan.
• Knowing exactly at what stage of the production life cycle your PPO is currently in.
• Tracking each individual PPO to ensure it meets the desired milestones and provide feedback to the relevant departments.
• Ensuring that CMT production lines are utilised appropriately to maximise available production capacity.

Departments that rely on production planning

• Sales – PPO production updates
• Production Coordinators – PPO production updates
• QA – Auditing 
• Warehouse and Despatch – Stock related
• Cutting room / Raw materials / Packaging dept – Production plan and PPO
• CMTs – Production plans and liaison.

Daily/Weekly Tasks

• Daily - Unnassigned Tab
• Daily - Capturing of PPOs received 
• Daily visits for Internal factories
• Daily telecom with CMT 
• Production Plans to be exported and sent to CMTs and copies printed for White board.

Rules for PPO Planning and Scheduling

• All PPOs received need to be signed for tracking between Planning and Admins.
• After analysing PPOs, if there are any discrepancies, PPOs are to be handed back to the sales team for correction.
• 48hr rule to be enforced for capturing PPOs handed in to Planning team.
• If PPOs cannot be accommodated within the requested PPO due date, you are required to advise the team within 72hrs.
• All Planned PPOs to reflect Final Planned Status
• PPOs to be handed to Raw materials and Packaging once a day.
• 3 Week plan fixed (unless production lines are under planned and cutting/packaging arrangements have been made, and authorised. 
• 3 Week plan fixed, 4–10-week plan visibility
• Plans to be sent to CMTs on a Thursday Afternoon @ 4:30pm 3weeks in advance.
• Plans to be sent to internal departments to procure CB + Boxes on a Thursday afternoon @ 4:30pm.
• All planners to work together to clean up backlog on capturing for the week, if this is not achieved, the entire team will need to come in on Saturdays to achieve what’s outstanding.

Weekly Meetings

• Mon/Wed/Fri – 9am cutting room meeting. 
• Tuesday - CMT Meetings (All day)
• Wedneday : Planner and Co-ordinator Meetings (11am onwards)

Rules for Feedback

• Should be done in a standardised format
• Either done via email or auto-populated information from SYNC
• Feedback should take place after each meeting in the form of minutes to the relevant dept
• Feedback should be sent on a daily basis with regards to issues and challenges related to production lines.
• Feedback should be forward planning related, by advising that there is a current issue, and it will therefore affect audit and delivery… Planners should be able to direct the sales and   co-ordination team on the current issue and when the ‘new realistic audit and delivery date should be'

Reports to be used

• Production Capacity Planner (Source document), this should strictly be used for the Production planner.
• Daily Production plan – should be the main document for all Operations departments (Cutting room/Raw materials/Packaging/CMTS)
• OSOT for monitoring deliveries over 2 weeks (CMT ETA to be captured on SYNC rather than many excel docs submitted from Coordinators)
• Outstanding Purchase report by supplier (Outstanding PPO report)
• PPO Summary recon report
  

Tools to be utilised to improve the planning function

• Daily Production plan – Utilising online date
• Daily output sheet – CMTs to provide daily output feedback at the end of the day, rather than waiting for a Tuesday CMT meeting to go through all orders
• Inputting CMT updates on SYNC