Production Planning and Control Audit Checklist

Production Planning and Control Audit Checklists allow companies to ensure that their processes comply with industry standards and requirements, while also identifying areas for improvement that could lead to cost savings, improved quality outcomes and greater customer satisfaction.

Auditing begins with pre-production review and analysis; then on-site production audit.

1. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Identification of manufacturing KPIs is crucial to understanding how effectively a business operates its operations, and often this process is made easier through reliable business intelligence (BI) or analytics software solutions, which offer sophisticated analysis and reporting functionality to monitor KPIs across an entire organization.

Production KPIs serve as an indication of your operations’ health, giving an idea of whether the manufacturing department is meeting its business objectives efficiently. From measuring waste produced to monitoring delivery schedule adherence, measuring these key indicators will help identify any short-term trends which might pose an operational challenge.

Production Schedule Attainment KPIs measure how many units were produced within a set timeframe, providing insight into how efficiently production workers are meeting target outputs and can inform training strategies to reduce error rates. Another key manufacturing KPI is Scrap Rate, which measures how much raw materials and finished goods were wasted due to cracks, spills and other errors in manufacturing.

2. Evaluate the Current Production Plan
Production planning is an essential aspect of production management. Companies use production planning to forecast what products to produce when, and in what quantity to meet customer demand. Production planners also need to determine what resources (such as raw materials and equipment ) to use while allocating budgets for overtime wages and repairs for workforce members.

Recognizing Potential Issues and Improvement Opportunities – Production bottlenecks may not always be obvious, but they do exist, often due to human mistakes or communication breakdown among team members. Companies need to recognize these inefficiencies so as to increase production efficiency while decreasing waste production costs.

Optimize Production Scheduling – To meet actual product demands efficiently and reduce resource waste, production schedules should align with actual demand in order to avoid overproduction and minimize resource wastage. This helps prevent stockouts while providing customers with quality goods on time.

3. Conduct a Post-Production Review and Analysis
Production process audits are vital in ensuring the entire production process runs as intended, helping identify areas for improvement that could save costs while improving production outcomes and increasing customer satisfaction.

An effective production planning and control audit checklist must cover every facet of the process from raw material inputs to finished goods outputs. An auditor should conduct this review with care, documenting their findings in an audit report.

An audit should begin with planning, which includes setting out all materials, personnel, manufacturing techniques and resources necessary for completing a project. It should also provide a list of potential issues and their mitigation solutions; then compare this plan against sales orders to determine whether production quantities and timing are suitable; plus include lead times required to secure all the raw materials necessary.

4. Conduct Inspections
As part of the production process, routine and follow-up inspections of facilities must take place. This may involve reviewing documents, records and product inspection for defects as well as interviewing employees. Inspections must be carried out impartially without bias while adhering to lawmaking regulations with due regard for individuals’ rights regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin.

An extensive quality inspection checklist makes inspectors’ jobs easier, helping ensure that all products leaving the factory meet quality standards and avoid costly re-starts and recalls. With this tool in place, quality can be maintained throughout production without costly re-starts or recalls occurring.

An audit checklist is a document or tool that assists an audit program by providing the documentation necessary for collecting evidence based on requirements outlined by industry standards. Production teams can utilize DATAMYTE’s all-in-one audit solution to create and implement production process audit checklists that give greater insight into how their business processes function.