Role of the SMV in Production Planning and Control

SMV of a garment is defined as how much time it would take to complete a garment in sewing. This is also known as garment work content and standard minutes.

To know the role of Garment SMV in production planning, first you have to understand primary roles of a Production Planning and Control (PPC) department.

Key roles of PPC department, those can’t be performed without having garment SMV.

• Determining capacity of the factory and capacity of the individual sewing lines in terms of how many pieces (product specific) factory can make in a certain time period with existing machines capacity. 
• Order booking based on factory capacity for different types of products
• Allocating of styles to the lines
• Determining production lead time for each orders (styles)
• Process scheduling
• Production execution and monitoring 

Roles of SMV in Production Planning includes

1. Line Capacity Calculation: The scientific method of calculating production capacity of a line (in production pieces per day) is to use standard time (SMV) of a garment. So, to determine production capacity of a line (for specific products) in pieces you need to know garment SMV.

2. Lead Time Calculation: Based on the production capacity, order allocation is done for different lines. A planning guy also needs to calculate how long a style would run in a line if loaded in a single line. If you need to complete the order in less time, calculate how many lines to be considered for an order.

3. Order booking: During order booking, you need to consider capacity availability in a certain period. In such cases you can use how many minutes you need to make the new orders using garment SAM value and compare the same with how many production minutes are available in your factory for the defined period.

4. Process Scheduling: Time & action calendar or production process scheduling of each order is done by planning department. Again to schedule a list of tasks, you need to know capacity of each process per day (or a predefined period). Based on the capacity of each process you allocate no. of days for the process. Like for sewing department, you determine sewing capacity of your line (or multiple lines) and according to that you set how many days to be given to sewing department for production.

5. Order Execution and Production Monitoring: Standard minutes help planners to set target for sewing lines. Mutually agreed and calculated target given to line supervisors. On daily basis when you check production status you can compare actual production with target production. In case production is getting delayed you can push production team based on given target.

6. Labor Cost Estimation: One most important task is labor cost estimation of a specific order. To estimate how much labor cost to be considered for an order (style), you can’t make labor costing without having garment SMV.