Design of Production Planning Process for Bakery Manufacturer

Abstract

This paper focuses on developing production planning process for a bakery manufacturer. In small bakery shops, good production planning may not be required but for a large-scale factory a good production plan is a critical factor to meet customer demands and have high utilization and productivity rate. An objective of this research is to develop production planning process for one bakery manufacturer in Thailand. This factory has just operated for two years and has no standard procedure for generating the production plan. Operators at shop floor make a plan one day in advance according to their experiences. The result from preliminary study shows that there are a lot of overtimes while the utilization of the resources especially ovens in baking station, which can be seen as a bottleneck process in a considered factory, is very low. The concept of the developed production planning process is to start scheduling on baking process, group product and sequence groups of products, sequence products in each group according to temperature and check the availability of resources. The result of the experiment shows that makespan can be reduced by 49.73 percent.