Production Plan with very often changing requirements

[ngiannopoulos]

Good afternoon.

I need your advise. I work in a company where demand exceed available capacity by 30% to 35%. So, what happens is that although we fix the production schedule for the following week, customer service keeps on changing the fixed weeks requirements, which means that the planning department has to make constant changes too. Actually, planning department spend all day making trade offs in the production plan, rescheduling raw materials, changing dates, etc. What would you suggest we could do in fixing this mess and making people in planning department lives easier, and maybe end up in a production schedule that is so flexible that changes are easy to made and results are easily changed?

Best personal regards and many thanks,

Nikos