Continued from Part 1 on Sales Forecast, append below a suggested checklist of what factors and the sources might be considered when constructing the Production Forecast

Production Forecast

Factors:

• Sales activity;
• Availability of resources such as labor and materials;
• Rate of inflation;
• Influence of the market forces on resources;
• Industrial relations;
• Union agreements such as productivity, redundancy, union membership and industry agreements;
• Finance or capital required;
• Type of machine employed;
• Availability of plant capacity;
• Company and government policy on redundancy;
• Location of plants overseas or locally;
• Opportunity for sub-contracting;
• Effect of overtime and shift working;
• Nature and type of production;
• Production methods used
• Size of organization;
• Quality of resources used;
• Indirect costs relating to production, separated into fixed, variable and semi-variable coss;
• Production service available such as transport, maintenance, repairs and servicing;
• Type of product;
• Inspection and
• Normal loss allowance

Sources of Information:

• Production manager, foreman, supervisor,etc
• Past production capacity;
• Economic indicators, manufacturer’s specification, documents on production scheduling and routing, dispatching, inspection reports and standards;
• Work study; and
• Sales forecast.

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