In recent years, China's printing industry has maintained a favorable development momentum. However, in the new era environment, the printing industry also faces numerous challenges such as increasing labor costs, small orders, numerous varieties, outdated management concepts, and lack of innovation capabilities. Particularly, recent research and diagnosis at printing plants have provided even deeper insights. Many printing enterprises have prominent production planning management issues, especially chaotic material control planning—materials that should arrive haven't, while materials that shouldn't arrive have; some materials even ignore actual production demand quantities, with all materials for entire orders arriving at once, causing warehouse overflow. On the other hand, to ensure customer JIT requirements, enterprises continuously arrange production. While customer delivery dates are guaranteed, they accumulate massive inventory themselves, with some inventory becoming stagnant due to prolonged storage periods, tying up capital.

Since the 1980s, internet technology has developed and been widely applied. Entering the 21st century, the vigorous development of new generation information technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and big data has brought leaps in new manufacturing technologies. The printing manufacturing industry has also entered a new era of development. Particularly since 2016, intelligent manufacturing characterized by the accelerated integration of information technology and manufacturing has become the main trend in global manufacturing. Lean management is the inevitable path to intelligent manufacturing. All enterprise operations management cannot be separated from production planning. Whether production planning can be accurately formulated is the basis for an enterprise's long-term survival, and production planning research is an important topic in modern enterprise management. In view of this, it is necessary for us to explore "lean production planning" in the printing industry to enable enterprises to better adapt to current development trends.

1.  Lean Production Concept

Lean production is a production management approach aimed at eliminating waste and reducing costs, supported by just-in-time (JIT) and automation, and grounded in continuous improvement activities. It adopts pull-type production and, through continuous improvements in organizational structure, staffing, operational methods, and market supply and demand, enables the production system to shorten production cycles, improve efficiency, enhance product quality, and quickly adapt to diverse market demands.

Therefore, the printing industry can fully draw on Toyota’s lean production philosophy, align with the wave of the information age, and integrate it with corporate operational goals. Through continuous improvement and lean small-scale overall integration solutions, it can eliminate waste, use lean principles to drive the production system, intentionally control inventory levels during production, shorten production cycles, boost productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction.

2.  The Importance of Production Planning

The level of production planning is one of the hallmarks of an enterprise’s competitiveness and is essential knowledge for enterprise managers. All personnel within an enterprise must possess production planning knowledge, as basic business activities such as finance, technology, production, and sales are inseparable from planning management.

Also known as the production master schedule, production planning predicts the future direction, types, and quantities of an enterprise’s products based on its sales plan, combined with actual production resources and capacity analysis. It makes overall arrangements for the variety, quantity, quality, and production schedule of current products, serving as the foundation for enterprise production management.

With the development of the times, production planning management has continuously gained new definitions, evolving from manufacturing to the service industry and other tertiary sectors. Its scope of management has expanded, and the modernization of technical information has brought about the modernization of planning management.

3. Production Planning in the Printing Industry Under the Lean Production Concept

1）Tasks and Requirements of Production Planning

The core tasks of production planning are to meet customer delivery deadlines, maintain full production capacity, provide a benchmark for material procurement, maximize the release of enterprise production capacity, and rationally control inventory levels. It also involves making supplementary arrangements for personnel and mechanical equipment in long-term production expansion plans, reducing operational costs, and maximizing corporate profits.

A reasonable and effective production plan must fully consider the enterprise’s production capacity, optimize and integrate various production resources, and align with actual production activities. Based on time horizons, it can be formulated as an annual production plan, monthly production plan, weekly plan, etc.

2）Six-Step Method for Production Planning

A comprehensive production plan follows six sequential steps:Step 1: ForecastingContinuously monitor the national and even global economic environment, analyze the overall industry market landscape in a timely manner, and conduct a comprehensive, accurate, and effective production forecast of actual customer demand based on the enterprise’s frequently changing orders. This forecast guides the direction of product variety and functional development.Step 2: StandardizationRely on historical production plans and actual execution records to determine the production time per unit product, material requirements, and standard man-hours for personnel and equipment, then formulate standard work plans.Step 3: BalancingBased on the execution status of production plans (or through information technology means such as digital 3D simulation of factory production), promptly identify production bottlenecks. Adjust and optimize production factors within the existing system, including equipment, raw materials, personnel, and site, to adapt to evolving production requirements.Step 4: CoordinationIntegrate internal and external information and resources of the production system, connecting customers, suppliers, and partners via information technology to form an industrial cluster that jointly maintains the product supply chain and responds rapidly to market changes.Step 5: InstructionIssue production tasks to each production unit and process, realizing the enterprise’s three-level planning management (company-level production plan, workshop-level production plan, and process-level production plan).Step 6: Rolling AdjustmentClosely track implementation progress and execution anomalies during plan execution, and make timely adjustments in response to unexpected situations.While the six-step method manifests differently across production types, the key indicators of an advanced and rational production process remain continuity, balance, and flexibility.

3）Lean Production Planning and Control and Inventory Management

Lean production planning and control and inventory management adhere to the core lean concept of "eliminating waste," aiming to optimize production resources and pursue rationality and efficiency in production. Through optimization of production technology, product processes, and industry standards, diverse and personalized market demands are satisfied. Lean production adopts pull production, starting from user demand, with upstream processes only producing what downstream processes require, pursuing zero inventory. Production organization is conducted through various forms of kanban to transmit demand information between processes, achieving just-in-time production. The production rhythm can be manually intervened and controlled to ensure logistics balance in production, keeping waste between inventory and materials at each production process within a very small range. The purpose is to eliminate all waste, pursue continuous refinement and improvement, streamline product development and design, and streamline all non-value-adding work in production management links, aiming to respond most rapidly to market demands with optimal quality, lowest cost, and highest efficiency.

4）Total Quality Management (TQM)

Starting with cultivating employee quality awareness, clarifying the concept that qualified products are not inspected into existence, emphasizing process quality management. Quality inspection and control are conducted at every process during production, ensuring no production of defective products, no acceptance of defective products, and no passing on of defective products. Any quality issues with products can be discovered and addressed promptly, even stopping production until problems are resolved. Reduce or even eliminate invalid processing of non-conforming products, reduce waste, and lower costs.

5）Personnel Deployment Methods Under Lean Production Guidance

Manufacturing is a human resource-intensive industry. In lean production models, coordination within teams is used to deploy human resources to meet changing production demands, satisfying production rhythms for leveled production. This dynamic human resource requirement demands that employees possess more skills, making the cultivation of multi-skilled workers particularly important. For enterprises, internal human resource management must also avoid talent waste. Avoid phenomena such as underutilization of talent, overextension of unqualified personnel, passive slackness, and brain drain caused by poor management. Deeply挖掘 and analyze common phenomena in enterprise human resource management, identify causes, improve personnel mechanisms and compensation management, and stimulate talent potential.

6）Lean Production and Intelligent Manufacturing

The two pillars of lean production are just-in-time and automation, which coincide with the thinking of intelligent manufacturing. With continuous technological progress and rising labor costs, replacing manual labor with automated equipment has become a trend. Through the construction of information networks, using software such as ERP, MES, PDM, EAS, and ANDON for information integration, comprehensive enterprise management is achieved, realizing digitalization and intelligentization of production process control. Introducing virtual simulation workshops, achieving parameterized human-machine interaction simulation analysis and visual on-site monitoring manufacturing, browsing and qualitative evaluation of process flows and logistics processes. Simulating the operating status of processing equipment, material buffer areas, and logistics equipment according to production plans and processes, analyzing and discovering issues such as material blockages, rhythm imbalances, and equipment waiting. Applying 3D logistics simulation tools, visualizing logistics and process resource layouts, evaluating logistics design and layouts, analyzing bottleneck workstations, and designing reasonable logistics distribution strategies. By establishing parameterized logistics simulation models, continuous improvement and optimization are achieved.

Conclusion

Intelligent manufacturing is the trend and goal of manufacturing industry development. From traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing, different industries have different markets, diversified market demands, product personalization, and different management foundations among enterprises, making each enterprise's development path unique. However, lean transformation is the essential first step that all must take. In China's current market environment, the printing industry's lean transformation efforts face various difficulties. This requires our printing managers to remain true to their original aspirations, apply lean concepts in combination with enterprise realities, start by changing employee awareness, use the ten principles of lean improvement as guidelines for action, enhance the market competitiveness of printing enterprises, and enable their sustained and stable development.

References

[1] Yang Guirong. Research on Production Planning of Electric Power Enterprises Under Lean Production Concept [J]. Telecom World, 2017. (10): 194-195.

[2] Qian Chunmeng. Discussion on Production Planning of Electric Power Enterprises Based on Lean Production Concept [J]. China High-Tech Enterprises, 2016. (16): 158-159.

[3] Chen Yi. Exploration of Production Planning of Electric Power Enterprises Based on Lean Production Concept [J]. Enterprise Technology Development, 2015. (36): 14-15.