Production planning addresses the central questions of economics - what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, how much to produce - within the context of manufacturing plants. Thus through production planning manufacturers are able to allocate production resources so as to meet customer requirements.

Production planning enables forecasting and planning of manufacturing resource requirements and capacity utilisation. This is to conserve resources, boost productivity and minimise production costs.

Production planning enables planning and tracking of manufacturing orders across multiple areas of processing. Priorities for production scheduling are assigned for each processing area on each shift. This is to optimise customer service.

Production planning software is designed for planning manufacturing production and used to prioritise and schedule production across manufacturing plants, machine capacity, labour resources and manufacturing processes.

Production planning software generates a production schedule detailing required production on each shift within each processing area The production schedule should be interactive, responding dynamically to contingencies in production at plant level.

Production planning software such as the Giraffe Scheduling System offers automated re-scheduling of production around machine breakdowns, amended customer orders or amended order priorities, delayed deliveries of materials or production running slower than expected. Whenever a schedule needs to be amended all of the existing jobs on the schedule are impacted. So are subsequent processes for each and every one of these jobs.

Production planning software such as the Giraffe Scheduling System software automates the RE-SCHEDULING process. This offers tremendous benefits not only in the scheduler's time but also the accuracy and relevance of the production schedule to allocate resources such as machine capacity.