TEACHING AGGREGATE PLANNING IN OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

This paper describes some unique characteristics of Aggregate Production Planning, which make the teaching of this topic in Operations Management courses somewhat different than other topics. A challenge when teaching Aggregate Planning is to make students understand the need to apply trial-and-error approaches to test, evaluate, and improve Aggregate Plans. In other words, do not just learn how to do the computations needed to develop an Aggregate Plan under certain conditions, but to actually analyze it and try to modify it with the objective of producing an improved plan. We recommend that in operations management courses, Aggregate Planning is taught within the context of a project, which includes a student individual element as well as a team component. The project involves the use of a spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel, to obtain Aggregate Plans with various input datasets and with different demand pattern and cost coefficients. It also requires each team to write a report discussing how the team derives its final plan and the insights acquired from the assignment. The paper starts with a compilation and description of unique features of Aggregate Planning, then it discusses the idea of using a students\u27 project when teaching this topic, and it finishes with an example. The paper also provides a couple of avenues for future research