How are supply planners different from demand planners and production planners?

Lets first see the explanations for the three terms,

Demand Planner - is the person who plans the future requirement of the products that are to be sold based on forecasting analysis

Production planner - is the person who takes demand plan as an input and plans for the production of the product, so that it is delivered to be marketing team for sales on time

Supply Planner - is the person who based on demand plan, plans for the raw materials and tools required for producing the product, so that production schedule is ensured as per plan.

Here Supply Planner, needs to collaborate more with both Demand and Production planner and vice versa for all three parties. For example, once the demand plan is released, then supply planner has to arrange for materials for the production and here he needs to analyse the supplier constraints, production constraints, inventory pile up etc., to plan the supply. Hence all three needs to be more collaborative to ensure smooth functioning of the activities to meet customer demand.

Demand planning:

The approach begins with a statistical forecast.  Data sources for the forecast include planned sales orders, customer contracts and inter-company standing orders. The final forecast is shared with key stakeholders, such as suppliers.

Key steps in demand planning  include:

•         Importing historical sales data

•         Creating statistical forecasts

•         Importing customer forecasts

•         Collaborating with customers

•         Managing forecasts

•         Building consensus forecasts

•         Supply and demand collaboration

•         Securing constrained forecasts

•         Confirmation with customers

•         Reexamining data and adjusting planning accordingly.

Supply Planning :

Manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and retailers face not only price competition, but also fluctuating customer demands. To handle these challenges, enterprises need real-time visibility into the customer demand pattern enabling them to make the desired changes in their supply chain planning faster than ever before.

Supply Chain Planning is an amalgamation of all the planning processes across various business planning functions such as Materials Requirement Planning, Sourcing and Distribution Network Planning, Inventory Planning, Financial Planning, and so on.

Manufacturers need to collaborate with suppliers, distributors and retailers to manage a balance between supply and demand. To achieve this, Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR) model has been adopted by many manufacturers.

Cybage helps its customers in developing solutions for suppliers' network and collaboration platforms to accurately report demand, plan procurement, schedule manufacturing activities, thus enabling enterprises to optimize their supply chain.

Capabilities in Supply Chain Planning 

• Demand Planning and Forecasting
• Supply Planning
• Inventory Planning
• Sales and Operational Planning
• Materials Requirement Planning (MRP)
• Master Data Management

Introduction

For efficient, effective and economical operation in a manufacturing unit of an organization, it is essential to integrate the production planning and control system. Production planning and subsequent production control follow adaption of product design and finalization of a production process.

Production planning and control address a fundamental problem of low productivity, inventory management and resource utilization.

Production planning is required for scheduling, dispatch, inspection, quality management, inventory management, supply management and equipment management. Production control ensures that production team can achieve required production target, optimum utilization of resources, quality management and cost savings.

Planning and control are an essential ingredient for success of an operation unit. The benefits of production planning and control are as follows:

• It ensures that optimum utilization of production capacity is achieved, by proper scheduling of the machine items which reduces the idle time as well as over use.
• It ensures that inventory level are maintained at optimum levels at all time, i.e. there is no over-stocking or under-stocking.
• It also ensures that production time is kept at optimum level and thereby increasing the turnover time.
• Since it overlooks all aspects of production, quality of final product is always maintained.

Production Planning

Production planning is one part of production planning and control dealing with basic concepts of what to produce, when to produce, how much to produce, etc. It involves taking a long-term view at overall production planning. Therefore, objectives of production planning are as follows:

• To ensure right quantity and quality of raw material, equipment, etc. are available during times of production.
• To ensure capacity utilization is in tune with forecast demand at all the time.

A well thought production planning ensures that overall production process is streamlined providing following benefits:

• Organization can deliver a product in a timely and regular manner.
• Supplier are informed will in advance for the requirement of raw materials.
• It reduces investment in inventory.
• It reduces overall production cost by driving in efficiency.

Production planning takes care of two basic strategies’ product planning and process planning. Production planning is done at three different time dependent levels i.e. long-range planning dealing with facility planning, capital investment, location planning, etc.; medium-range planning deals with demand forecast and capacity planning and lastly short term planning dealing with day to day operations.

Production Control

Production control looks to utilize different type of control techniques to achieve optimum performance out of the production system as to achieve overall production planning targets. Therefore, objectives of production control are as follows:

• Regulate inventory management
• Organize the production schedules
• Optimum utilization of resources and production process

The advantages of robust production control are as follows:

• Ensure a smooth flow of all production processes
• Ensure production cost savings thereby improving the bottom line
• Control wastage of resources
• It maintains standard of quality through the production life cycle.

Production control cannot be same across all the organization. Production control is dependent upon the following factors:

• Nature of production( job oriented, service oriented, etc.)
• Nature of operation
• Size of operation

Production planning and control are essential for customer delight and overall success of an organization.

Fully agree with the reply given by  Sathish Prabhu.V

Hello Team,

Demand planning is a multi-step operational supply chain management (SCM) process used to create reliable forecasts.  Effective demand planning can guide users to improve the accuracy of revenue forecasts, align inventory levels with peaks and troughs in demand, and enhance profitability for a given channel or product.

Over the last decade, I've seen an interesting shift in the workforce away from Forecast Analysts to Demand Planners. At the time, it seemed to be a result of more organizations getting lean, reducing head count, and turning combining the role of Inventory Planner and Forecast Analyst. That's where the "Demand Planner" came from, and really was a role for a jack-of-all-trades. All of the criteria above are absolutely necessary for the role of Demand Planner. However, rather than trying to find that perfect fit, I would say that perhaps more important than the individual, would be Demand Planning as a department for your organization. This department would have people of varying strengths/weaknesses, but combined to be a powerhouse of data, information, insight, and execution. You can keep your Forecast Analyst (the math geek) and your Market Analyst (the customer advocate) and your Supply Chain Analyst (the supplier interface) as your individual contributors, while having a Manager or Director of Demand Planning possessing enough knowledge of everything previously stated, and the know-how to navigate the executive branch. If you have 100% confidence in each of the individual contributors because you're using each of them for their particular strengths, then the sum of the parts should create a well versed, statistically backed, operationally driven juggernaut of a Demand Planning department.

Production Planning and Master Scheduling are sometimes combined depending on the company and their available resources but they have very distinct and differing responsibilities. The main difference is that production planning works with MRP planned orders & MPS firm planned orders outside of the cumulative lead-time window while master schedulers work with converting the MRP planned orders into MPS firm planned orders and ultimately into work orders once they come into the execution window or inside the cumulative lead-time.

Production planning is the process of modeling the available capacity in order to effectively balance workloads across the organization while keeping in sync with the changing demand picture. Capacity modeling is basically a mathematical analysis of how many units can be manufactured over a set time period utilizing a specific work-center(s) or resource(s). Usually these calculations are presented in time buckets such as Average Daily Rates (ADR) or how many units, on average can be made per day.Regards,

Saiyid

Supply planner could be a person in the procurement department whose responsibility is to procure raw material in case of manufacturing to ensure the required quantity of finish goods or raise purchase orders to maintain accurate inventory levels to support sales demand.

I apologize for the answer, I leave the answer to experts specialists in this field that's not my specialty field

Supply Planner is the person who has a complete scope of the whole shipment. he understands the peculiarities of the business which the demand planner is running & he takes care that the quality of the supply suits these peculiarities. He also takes care of the scheduling of these supplies to be  made available

in time.

full agree with all expert answers above