Production Planner

About the Role

Develop, coordinate, and maintain production schedules to ensure customer orders are fulfilled on time while optimizing inventory levels, labor utilization, and manufacturing capacity. This role serves as a key link between sales, purchasing, inventory control, manufacturing, and customer service.

Responsibilities

• Release production packages to the shop floor following procedure R4-8-1 to balance shop load across similarly capable workstations, avoid bottlenecks, and meet customer expectations as defined by BETE quality standards and/or the Customer Requirement Plan.
• Select a machine plan using a solid understanding of machine capabilities such as max work-holding size, travel lengths, and cutting speeds.
• Choose primary or alternate paths for work depending on delivery timelines and quantity restrictions.
• Identify when product produced on an alternate path is inconsistent with the primary and notify engineering of changes in form, fit, or function.
• Monitor shop workload daily for delivery performance against customer ship dates.
• Collaborate with Lead people to schedule work according to procedure PL3-1-1.
• Proactively resolve overall capacity bottlenecks by transferring work from highly loaded workstations to underutilized ones to ensure all jobs are completed by designated due dates.
• Inform Shift Supervisor as soon as capacity changes so staffing can be adjusted to proper levels.
• Solicit feedback from Shop Manager, Shift Supervisors, and Lead People to standardize the process of communicating capacity changes.
• Notify the customer service person who entered the order via EDA job review of orders that are late or in danger of being late.
• Provide achievable, challenging, and statistically backed delivery date estimates for customer orders.
• Understand shop workload and how current capacity can affect future delivery promises.
• Develop standards and tools for providing delivery dates using input such as total par hours currently in the shop/department and average weekly output.
• Process Change Orders within an average of 2 days, driving toward mistake-free change orders by standardizing the process and eliminating waste such as over-processing and waiting.
• Update active jobs by adjusting the process plan and schedule as dictated by the change order.
• Notify Customer Service as soon as it is known if a Change Order is not possible due to schedule, capacity, or other constraints.
• If a Change Order is not possible, seek to understand why it was ever released by asking questions and looking for training/standardization opportunities.
• Create and release Purchase Orders (PO) for jobs, ensuring expectations for delivery and quality requirements are clearly conveyed to the vendor.
• Manage the level of finished goods (FG)/work in process (WIP) inventory to ensure all catalog items are available within a maximum of 21 days.
• Continuously drive inventory down, striving for the ideal of zero inventory.
• Maintain trigger and targets on product by creating and refining standard formulas that account for order history, raw material lead times, inventory turns, and other related metrics.
• Lower inventory levels by reducing total items that have triggers and targets and setting a purge plan for existing inventory.
• Review triggers and targets quarterly to identify items that do not need to be stocked and present findings to the manager.
• Lead lean practices by identifying and eliminating manufacturing and process waste.