Advantages and Disadvantages of Process Planning

Advantages

The advantages of process planning are given below :

• Process planning helps in manufacturing a product economically and competitively within the limits of design specifications laid down.
• It helps in the conversion of design data to work instruction.
• As process planning is an intermediate stage between designing the product and manufacturing, a good process plan will produce a quality product.
• A process plan coordinates the efforts of all factors in manufacturing the product.
• It acts as a guide to use the existing or the proposed facilities.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages of manual process planning are given below :

• It requires a significant amount of time and expertise to determine an optimal routing for each new part design.
• As each individual process planners have their own opinion about what constitutes the best routing, therefore there are differences among the operation sequences developed by various planners. This results in inconsistency in developing the process sheet.
• The manual process planning requires highly skilled process planners therefore, costly..

The above problems encountered with manual process planning, resulted in developing the computer aided process planning systems or automated process planning system. They provide the opportunity to generate production routings which are rational, consistent and possibly even optimal.