Building a Rough Master Production Schedule

From an aggregate plan, a planner must disaggregate the available information and build a rough master production schedule (MPS) that identifies the batches produced in each period at the level of each product family. We return to the Red Tomato example to illustrate a simple approach to disaggregate an aggregate plan. Although this approach is not necessarily optimal, it is simple to implement and allows for a feasibility check. More sophisticated methods (e.g., see Bitran and Hax, 1981) are available if a planner wants to search for better solutions. These methods, however, are difficult to implement and may not be able to reflect all the complex realities. For this reason, we propose this simple approach. 

TABLE 8-9 1 Disaggregating the Aggregate Plan at Red Tomato Tools for Period 1  

Family Setup Time/Batch (hour) Average Batch Size Production Time/Unit (hour) Production Quantity Number of Setups Setup Time (hours) Production Time (hours) 

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