Supply Chains: A Manager's Guide

Integrating Schedules

The techniques discussed in the preceding sections are designed to help a single company plan its production operations, integrating plans across multiple facilities as necessary to produce a coordinated flow of goods. There remains the problem of integrating production plans across multiple companies in the supply chain, smoothing the flow of goods between as well as within companies. This problem is directly analogous to the one examined at the end of the preceding chapter in the discussion of shared forecasting: When companies plan their production operations independently, they engage in a great deal of redundant effort, and the likelihood that their separate plans will mesh correctly when they are executed is effectively ...