Häufig gestellte Fragen
What exactly does Plan-to-Produce mean?
Plan-to-Produce refers to the continuous end-to-end business process that runs from sales and production planning through material requirements planning and the production order to finished goods that are ready for storage or delivery. It is not a single software module but a process umbrella that bundles several functional areas of an ERP system into one coherent chain. Plan-to-Produce thus covers the manufacturing core, while upstream and downstream workflows such as procurement or order processing sit in their own end-to-end processes. Above all, this process view helps companies make breaks between departments and at system boundaries visible.
Is Plan-to-Produce only relevant for industrial companies?
Plan-to-Produce is primarily relevant for manufacturing companies, since the process describes the path from planning to actual production. Pure trading or service companies without in-house production usually work with processes such as Demand-to-Supply instead, which map demand and procurement without a manufacturing step. The process covers different manufacturing modes, from discrete manufacturing through process and batch production to job-shop and variant manufacturing. Its concrete design therefore varies considerably by industry, manufacturing type and the customisation depth of the respective ERP setup.
Which steps does the Plan-to-Produce process comprise?
The process is typically divided into sales and production planning, material requirements planning, capacity and detailed scheduling, creation and release of the production order, and shop-floor control with completion confirmations. From forecasts and orders, a production programme is first created, often within an S&OP process, from which material requirements are derived via MRP. Operations are then scheduled against machine and personnel capacities, production orders are released, and progress in production is reported back. The result is finished goods that are put into stock or assigned directly to a customer order, which builds the bridge to downstream processes such as Order-to-Cash.
How does Plan-to-Produce differ from MRP, APS and MES?
Plan-to-Produce is the overarching process view, while MRP, APS and MES denote individual methods or system categories within this chain. MRP calculates material requirements but classically assumes unlimited capacity, which is why an APS system is often added for realistic sequencing against finite resources. An MES operates at the operational end and controls production in real time, but does not cover upstream sales and production planning. The traditional term PPS overlaps heavily with Plan-to-Produce in substance, but emphasises the system category, whereas Plan-to-Produce puts the end-to-end process view front and centre.
How does Plan-to-Produce relate to manufacturing types such as Make-to-Stock or Make-to-Order?
The manufacturing type largely determines when and on what basis planning within the Plan-to-Produce process is triggered. With Make-to-Stock, the production order is created on the basis of sales forecasts and inventory targets before specific customer orders exist, which enables even capacity utilisation but carries inventory risks. With Make-to-Order or Engineer-to-Order, by contrast, production is only triggered by concrete customer orders, so planning is tied more closely to individual orders and to the availability commitment. An ERP system must therefore map the respective manufacturing type cleanly and establish an end-to-end connection between the sales and production levels.
How does Plan-to-Produce interlock with other end-to-end processes?
Plan-to-Produce stands on an equal footing with the other classic end-to-end processes Order-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay and is closely interlinked with both. The material requirements derived from production planning generate purchase proposals for bought-in parts, which become purchase orders and goods receipts in the Procure-to-Pay process. Conversely, the finished goods flow into the Order-to-Cash process as soon as they are assigned to a customer order, delivered and invoiced. The real added value of the process view lies in data continuity: master data such as bills of materials and routings, planning data from the forecast and transaction data from completion confirmations should mesh without media discontinuities so that availability commitments remain reliable across all processes.