Operations, Supply Chain Management and Logistics Essay

Aggregate planning is the process at which a preliminary schedule is developed, analyzed and maintained I an organization. The schedule is usually made in advance of a few months, and it gives the management an overview of the materials, which are to be procured, and the total cost of operations is kept to the minimum over that period. The term aggregate means that the planning is usually done for single output or a few aggregated products. Aggregate planning influences both demand and supply. The companies use this type of planning to meet the demands that have been forecasted through controlling the inventory.

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Aggregate planning can be achieved through some methods; charting methods. Graphical methods and mathematical methods. The graphical and the charting methods only require a few variables at ago. This allows the management to look at the forecasted demands about the current capacity. These methods can allow the management to make decisions about the future

Mathematical methods are much more complicated as compared to the other methods. The mathematical models commonly use in aggregate planning are the transportation method of linear programming and the coefficients management models. The transportation models provide a plan to minimize the costs, and the management of coefficients model, on the other hand, uses the manager's experience and performance in making decisions. This particular method assumes that the manager has made good decisions in the past and will continue to do so even in future. However, this process is complicated. A particular model with a single objective often has drawbacks since the constraints indicated in the formulations may differ regarding rigidity. The materials requirement planning (MRP) is a control system that is involved in planning and scheduling. The MRP is used to manage the manufacturing processes. Most of the MRP systems are software based although some systems can be handled manually. The MRP system affects almost all the functions in a firm.

To create an MRP, several things are required; an inventory, a bill of materials, purchase records and a production schedule. All these things affect certain aspects of a business which are managing, scheduling, finance, and operations. All these functions and affected in different ways.

MRP affects management by providing a plan for production. Master production schedule provides a plan or a schedule of how things are going to be operated and when. This gives the management a head start.

MRP affects finance since it affects the bill of materials. This is a list of materials that need to produce one product. Finance comes to place since there are materials that required to be purchased to start the process of production.

MRP affects scheduling since the whole purpose of MRP is to plan on production. As much as planning for labor is important, also planning for the arrival of specific parts according to the management schedule is equally important.

The Reasons Why Scheduling Services Are Difficult

Scheduling services' difficultness occurs since demand and supply services are generally tied together. Analytically, to meet calls for demand, there should be frameworks to ensure that supply is readily available. Additionally, the need for goods and services cannot be easily predicted. Thus there could arise a problem of having more workforce inconsiderably on board. Lack of proper prediction of demand subject businesses to challenges that are connected to difficulty in scheduling services (Hitt, Xu, & Carnes, 2016). Also, enterprises face challenges regarding the number of the workforce to keep on board. On the other hand, if businesses have too many available people, the businesses face the risk of paying too much for the workforce who end up serving fewer customers who are below the expected number. The problems of demand and workforce contribute to the difficulty of scheduling services. If a company is service-based, stockpiling portrays significant challenges. For that matter, stockpiling makes the whole situation difficult for the service oriented company.

According to military service, scheduling becomes a problem whenever there is a call of duty that requires many workforces but an underestimation results to less workforce on board. On the other hand, Air Force usually predict the number of terror attacks to focus on recruiting personnel to help in solving the possible issues that might occur. The predictions that are made are generally higher or lower the actual occurrence of the problems. For an Air Force activity, the number of planes or workforce to plan for an event may be in excess or less since scheduling is a standard problem in operations logistics and supply chain management.

Taking an example of the military base, when the demand is not enough, there are usually problems with paying the workforce with no structured work done during the service. Also, workforce ends up sitting for days without being called on duty due to a lack of demand for service. Over-recruitment of application results in a high cost of maintenance yet the service done by the military is minimal.

Questions that Can Be Answered with PERT/ CPM Scheduling Techniques

PERT denotes program evaluation and review technique whereas CPM refers to critical path measurement. PERT can determine schedule of the operations managers' larger projects. The ability to control all possible projects by specifying the kind of events and critical path enables the organization and the managers to make the necessary decision (Hitt et al., 2016). Therefore, questions that arise are designed to allow for the operations managers to determine the workability of the approaches. The methods employed tend to answer a variety of issues that operations manager are connected to. The questions that are most critical areas outlined below.

• When will the completion time of the project be?
• What is the critical path to be followed to ensure that the project lifetime is suitable for the deliverables?
• What are the possible essential tasks for the project?
• What are the non-critical functions and why?
• What conditions should be put in place to enable the project to be completed in time?

The project manager depends on the critical tasks to determine the required path to be followed for the project to be successful. The entire project will be completed in time if the essential functions are completed in time (Hitt et al., 2016). PERT and CPM are required to be utilized by the operations manager to be able to come up with a definite answer concerning the time that the project will be completed. Also, CPM and PERT will enable the manager to be able to identify the answer to the question, 'is my project on time?' also, the manager can be able to get the answer to the question, 'why isn't my project on track of time?' Another possible achievement that the operation manager can come to is to determine if the production goals are to be met throughout the process of the project lifetime. All limiting factors can be identified whenever the questions are asked by the project manager and answered according to the analysis of the project life regarding PERT and CPM.

How Expert Systems Improve Maintenance System

Expert systems have become prominent in project maintenance systems. An expert system improves the production systems to determine the problems inherent in the project. Expert systems tend to develop and predict upcoming issues. Predictive posture and maintenance are enhanced. An example of predictive maintenance is taking the precaution by changing car engine oil every 4500 miles (Hitt et al., 2016). Maintenance prevention is done even before the issue arises. Also, expert systems improve maintenance systems through catastrophic planning which enables the experts to find a possible solution to any future risk occurrence. Repairs help in minimizing the effect of knockout of machines due to proper maintenance approaches. Adequate risk prevention enables systems to troubleshoot the possible risks that can lead to failure of devices and capital-intensive equipment. The cost of maintenance helps in solving the problem of systems replacement whenever a knockout is experienced.

References

Hitt, M. A., Xu, K., & Carnes, C. M. (2016). Resource-based theory in operations management research. Journal of Operations Management, 41, 77-94.