Advanced Planning and Scheduling: A Critical Part of Customer Fulfillment
Steve McVey - November 1, 1999

Drivers from E-Commerce

Broadly speaking, APS is a set of techniques that facilitate and/or automate human decision-making. More specifically, APS comprises methods for solving complex problems that arise in the operational infrastructure used to support customer fulfillment. The solution to these problems is usually a sequence, strategy, or configuration that results in the optimum material, time, or cost savings subject to a set of constraints. An example from everyday experience is the problem of getting dressed in the morning. If one specifies the goal of this problem as 'a fully dressed person', then many possible solutions exist, however, constraints imposed on the dresser quickly reduce the number of acceptable outcomes. For instance, shoes are not put on before socks (sequence), the activity cannot take more than twenty minutes (strategy), fashion dictates that no one wear two ties (configuration), and so on. This problem is a simple example of linear programming, a mathematical technique for finding solutions of linear equations subject to simultaneous constraints. It is just one example of the vast array of problems that are addressed by APS...