Why is good production planning difficult to carry out?

1. Production planning does not pursue a single objective. 2. It has to balance several goals at once, and those goals may conflict. 3. Providing high-quality service while keeping operating costs low is one such conflict, because quality usually costs money. 4. Keeping profits high while maintaining adequate inventories of finished products is another, because stock ties up cash. 5. Accomplishing all these goals together is sometimes simply difficult, which is why planning involves trade-offs rather than optimisation of one measure. 6. Option A overstates the problem, since forecasting is imperfect rather than impossible, and options C and D invent constraints that do not exist. _Source: OpenStax Introduction to Business (CC BY 4.0), Ch 10 "Achieving World-Class Operations Management", section Gearing Up: Production Planning_