Production and Supply Planning Features and Functions
Today's supply chain planning systems have significant advantages over MRP II systems of the past. These systems incorporate up-to-date algorithms and philosophies on how supply chains work. In addition, they have a technology advantage over MRP II, in that they are memory resident, which allows the solutions to solve for simulation issues extremely quickly, with very large arrays (models). These large models solve for simultaneous, multi-level, and multi-node problems that MRP II systems cannot.
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Strategic Supply Chain Planning
Strategic supply chain planning (SCP) is designed to create long-term supply strategies. Included within SCP is the capability to value long-term capacity requirements, sourcing requirements, long-term materials planning, and integrate these with the marketing and sales organization over a time period of months to years.
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Operational Planning
Production planning in the new APS systems can aggregate or disaggregate multilevel plans, so the concept of a master production system (MPS) to material resource planning (MRP) to capacity resource planning (CRP) can fundamentally be abolished. These systems can solve to multi-level plans, sites, and simulated planning objectives (if the user is not familiar with various planning algorithms we strongly recommend that the requirements and needs of your business processes be understood. We cannot go into an in-depth tutorial in this RFI worksheet).
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Procurement Collaboration
Ability to dynamically collaborate with the supplier to create demand, place orders, and get a systemic response from the supplier with commitments and changes.
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Order Management, Fulfillment, and Channel Integration
Order management involves the ability to analyze orders and their impact on production strategies and plans. Many planning systems have real-time order promising capabilities to allow rapid responses to customers.
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Utilities for Planning Systems
Planning systems have unique data requirements, frequently these need to be developed within the context of the creation of the planning model. In addition, unique data may come from customers and suppliers who will need to be included.
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Systems Integration
Integration is an important issue in APS systems due to the fundamentally different architecture (memory resident versus integrating to database on disk) they rely on. ERP systems are both and APS systems are memory resident, so integration approaches are important. Therefore, fundamentally, is not much advantage to a single vendor. The database content, metadata, is different as well. APS planning systems, due to the richer algorithms they employ have richer data that is not housed within the ERP database. The real issue for users is traversing from batch to memory resident. If the vendor does not understand memory resident technologies well, the uploads can be cumbersome (even with the same vendor) and the use of memory can be non-optimized, losing the advantage of the single vendor approach (buying ERP and APS from the same software vendor).
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Supply Chain Analytics Features and Functions
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