Production Planning for Management Consultants & Analysts (Udemy.com)

What is the aim of this course?

Consulting firms are hired very often to help with Supply Chain and Production. During such projects, you will quite often have to look at the production planning and optimize it. Optimizing production planning will require a good understanding of what drives production capacity, as well as how production can impact the costs in the whole supply chain. In this course, I will teach how to perform fast and efficiently different types of analyses related to production planning.

In the course you will learn the following things:

1. What does the production capacity depend on and how to estimate it

2. How to find optimal production batches for different products in Excel that will minimize costs in the whole supply chain

3. How to plan production capacity for the future

4. How and when to use different methods for production planning

This course is based on my 15 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting firms and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, performance improvement, and turn-arounds in the biggest firms from Retail, FMCG, SMG, B2B, and services sectors that I worked for. I have carried out or supervised over 90 different performance improvement projects in different industries that generated a total of 2 billion in additional EBITDA. On the basis of what you will find in this course, I have trained in person over 100 consultants, business analysts, and managers who now are Partners in PE and VC funds, Investment Directors and Business Analysts in PE and VC, Operational Directors, COO, CRO, CEO, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members, etc. On top of that my courses on Udemy were already taken by more than 300 000 students including people working in EY, Walmart, Booz Allen Hamilton, Adidas, Naspers, Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, Dell, Walgreens, Orange, and many others.

I teach through case studies, so you will have a lot of lectures showing examples of analyses, and tools that we use. To every lecture, you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excels as well as additional presentations, resources, and materials shown in the lectures so as a part of this course you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modification, be applied by you or your team in your work.

Why have I decided to create this course?

Production planning is very difficult for most management consultants. You not only have to master more advanced techniques, but you also have to have a good understanding of the production processes. Most firms, don’t give you the full toolbox that you may need. This may lead to huge frustration during consulting projects and a lot of inefficiencies.

Therefore, I have decided to create this course that will help students understand or refresh the main skills and tools that they need during consulting projects devoted to production planning, supply chain, or production improvement. The course will give you the knowledge and insight into real-life case studies that will make your life during a consulting project much easier. Thanks to this course, you will know what and how to do during consulting projects. You will learn how to analyze data and draw conclusions from the analyses. On top of that, you will also master the essential information related to production and supply chain.

To sum it up, I believe that if you want to become a world-class Management Consultant or Business Analyst you have to have a pretty decent understanding of production planning and analyses done during projects devoted to production optimization. That is why, I highly recommend this course to Management Consultants or Business Analysts, especially those that want to concentrate on operations, production, or supply chain. The course will help you become an expert in production planning on the level of McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and other top consulting firms.

In what way will you benefit from this course?

The course is a practical, step-by-step guide loaded with tons of analyses, tricks, and hints that will significantly improve the speed with which one analyzes businesses. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will learn:

1. What does the production capacity depend on and how to estimate it

2. How to find optimal production batches for different products in Excel that will minimize costs in the whole supply chain

3. How to plan production capacity for the future

4. How and when to use different methods for production planning

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion field or by messaging me directly.

How the course is organized?

The course is divided currently into the following sections:

• Introduction. We begin with a little intro to the course as well as some general info on how the course is organized.

• What does Production Planning do in practice? In the second section, we will look at some essential concepts that we will need to do the production planning. We will devote a lot of attention to removing bottlenecks.

• Essential Methods for Production Planning. In this brief section, I will show the main methods used in production planning.

• KPIs and goals for Production Planning. In production planning, you have to decide how to organize production so that it is optimal not only from the point of view of production but also from the whole supply chain. That is why, in this section, we will look at KPIs and goals that Production planning concentrates on.

• Advanced Methods for Production Planning. In this section, we will look at more advanced methods of finding optimal production batches. They can be very useful in more complicated case studies.

• Kanban & Continuous Flow. Production planning roles will differ if you are using Kanban and continuous flow. That is why in this section we will look at those two concepts.

• Production Planning in Continuous-Flow. In this section, I will show you how to define the size of kanbans you will be using in the firm.

• Capacity management. In the last section, we will discuss how to manage the medium-term and long-term capacity available in your production facilities.