The time and action plan (TNA or T&A Plan) is an important tool for merchandising teams to enlist their day-to-day activities or to enlist the different operations involved in the process of completing an order. T&A is the most important activity for timely shipment. This process involves various departments and different people in the manufacturing. Hence, the T&A plan helps the merchandiser to analyse every individual operation with the aspect of, when to start? when to end? Is the process according to the plan? Or is there any deviation with the activity? In short, a time and action calendar defines the ideal date/time period within which the major activities of an order should occur against a scheduled delivery.
The T&A plan helps to streamline the pre-production activities at different levels - Extensive process flow of an order from the sampling to dispatch with tasks to be performed on each activity, Detailed production capacity of various departments of their unit and tentative lead time details of various raw material and buffer time required for each department, Duration of transportation, shipment and logistic facility for the particular customer and exact delivery date to the customer.