For any business, creating a production plan can be challenging. Using a spreadsheet such as the popular Microsoft Excel 2007 can simplify the task by performing complicated mathematical functions for you, creating charts and organizing user data so that it can be easily interpreted. Additionally, Excel has advanced functions that can be helpful in production planning. By entering your data in this fashion, you have set your worksheet up to work with Excel’s planning features. The Scenario Manager, for example, allows you to ask Excel to show you what would happen if a certain scenario were in place. Scenario Manager would be used at times you wonder what would happen if a certain scenario occurred. It can give you a summary page based on what would happen if you made those changes without changing the data in your original sheet. Goal Seek allows you to ask Excel to show you what you need to change in your production to reach a certain goal. For example, if you had a goal for your staffing budget to fall under a certain total amount for the quarter, Goal Seek could tell you how much you’d need to spend each month to reach that goal.
