Production control
technique in supply chain management
Within supply chain management and manufacturing, production control is the activity of monitoring and controlling any particular production or operation. Production control is often run from a specific control room or operations room. With inventory control and quality control, production control is one of the key functions of operations management.
Overview
Production control is the activity of monitoring and controlling a large physical facility or physically dispersed service. It is a "set of actions and decision taken during production to regulate output and obtain reasonable assurance that the specification will be met." The American Production and Inventory Control Society, nowadays APICS, defined production control in 1959 as:
Production control is the task of predicting, planning and scheduling work, taking into account manpower, materials availability and other capacity restrictions, and cost so as to achieve proper quality and quantity at the time it is needed and then following up the schedule to see that the plan is carried out, using whatever systems have proven satisfactory for the purpose.
Production planning and control in larger factories is often run from a production planning department run by production controllers and a production control manager. Production monitoring and control of larger operations is often run from a central space, called a control room or operations room or operations control center (OCC).
The emerging area of Project Production Management (PPM), based on viewing project activities as a production system, adopts the same notion of production control to take steps to regulate the behavior of a production system where in this case the production system is a capital project, rather than a physical facility or a physically dispersed service.
Production control is to be contrasted with project controls. As explained, project controls have developed to become centralized functions to track project progress and identify deviations from plan and to forecast future progress, using metrics rooted in accounting principles.
“Production control” enters the record as technique in supply chain management. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Production, control and technique can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16321575. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Production control” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.