Every production oriented enterprise faces production planning and programming activities. By planning we refer to the decision of which products to produce and in what quantities, along with estimated delivery dates. Finite capacity production programming aims to assign production resources to comply with the production plan in an effective and efficient way. These two activities are complemented by the need of sales and/or consumptions forecasting in order to assure that a make-to-stock environment is met and to align the production plan with the demand imposed by clients. These three dimensions (forecasting, planning and programming) are intimately related.

In this talk these three problems are briefly introduced. A motivation is also given along with facts that demonstrate the sheer mathematical and computational complexity of such problems. The talk continues with the advantages of using advanced Soft Computing approaches in order to optimize the usage of production resources, to comply with the production plan in an effective and efficient way, to minimize stocks and to increase customer satisfaction. The talk concludes with an introduction of an advanced software package for production planning: ControlStocks that serves well when solving the aforementioned problems of forecasting and production planning.