A production planner keeps work and materials flowing so orders ship on time. You turn sales forecasts and customer orders into schedules, check that materials and people are ready, chase delays, and report progress. The job runs on a few repeatable ideas: demand, capacity, lead time, and inventory. Once you understand how they connect, every task makes sense. If a schedule needs 500 units by Friday and the line makes 100 a day, you need a plan, and that plan is your job. Most people enter with a high school diploma or some college, and Excel plus clear communication gets you hired. Everything
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Stage 1 of 4 · about 8 weeks
Learn how a factory flows: orders, bills of materials, routings, work orders, lead time, capacity, and inventory basics. Build comfort in Excel (formulas, sorting, filters, pivot tables, XLOOKUP) and practice writing short, clear status emails. Build a simple weekly schedule for a pretend shop making three products.
How a factory flows: orders, BOMs, routings, work orders
Everything a planner does sits on a few documents. If you can read them, you can see what is needed, in what order, and where a job can get stuck. Without this, schedules are just guesses.
Inventory basics
Planners are asked every day, 'Do we have enough to run this job?' Answering it correctly means knowing what the inventory numbers really mean and which ones to trust.
Excel for planners: formulas, tables, lookups, pivot tables
Excel is the planner's daily tool and the top software on the job. Fast, clean spreadsheets let you answer questions in minutes and catch problems before the floor does.
Clear status emails and floor communication
Planners rarely make things themselves; they move work through people. Your top skills in this job are speaking, listening and writing. A short, clear email can prevent a missed shipment.
Building a simple weekly schedule
This is where the pieces join. A schedule is a promise about who makes what, when, using which resources. Doing a small one by hand shows how the pieces connect, and gives you something to show employers.
Then 3 more stages (about 60 weeks in all) with lessons, drills, projects, 10 interview questions with strong answers and free resources.