The general aim of this work is to link methods from the area of operations
research to real world problems in SME in production planning, as this has not been done yet, to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, we investigate if it is possible to apply standard algorithms from the area of operations research, which have been shown to provide good solutions in production planning to real-life cases from SMEs. As the problem structure differs and the size of input varies, we compare and analyse the performance of the algorithms to make a more general statement about further problem contexts.