With popularity of the just-in-time (JIT) philosophy, researchers have started to seek the integration of Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP-II) and JIT methodologies. This paper deals with the master production planning problem for a mass manufacturing system in the JIT environment, an earliness–tardiness production planning (ETPP) problem. The objective is to determine the optimum production rate for each product so that the total penalties imposed on the early and tardy production for all production periods be minimized. A goal programming (GP) approach is proposed to formulate the ETPP problem in a more generalized form, which includes several existing models in one unifying model. Moreover, the proposed GP algorithm ensures a global optimum solution, while the existing ones did not. In addition, it also possesses the advantages over others, such as easier to comprehend, easier to solve, and easier to extend it to the problem of multiple goals.