Integration between production planning, quality and sales: A proposed framework

Production Planning is a continuous process that aims to achieve particular products i at the right time in the future, which targets the best utilization of the available resources to satisfy the market demand. This study focuses on how production planning is to be integrated with quality control and sales. A myriad of variants of the problem has been addressed in literature, however this study will focus on two major variants observed in a brewing company located in Gauteng, South Africa. The first variant asks for integrating both production planning, quality control and sales process to obtain a more accurate and realistic production plan, whereas the second variant asks for addressing and analyzing the mutual influence between the three processes (production planning, sales and quality control) and the packaging and warehouse in the brewing company. To cope with these issues, a research framework is proposed in this paper. The aim of the proposed framework is to minimize the disparity between the planned production volume and the actual produced volume while considering the integration and the mutual influence between the aforementioned processes. The proposed framework is to be used as a starting point in developing a mathematical model that will tackle the aforementioned variants.