Technology Scorecards: Aligning IT Investments with Business Performance

Chapter 3. Supply Chain Management

Introduction

Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) is a new technology, a revolutionary breakthrough, and the greatest innovation since the assembly line. It aims to do optimized planning and scheduling of all the manufacturing resources and personnel, keeping in view the constraints (i.e., man, machine, material, and time). It may surprise you to learn that companies have benefited from APS techniques for over 30 years. APS is a collection of well-established solution methods made more accessible and effective by incremental improvements in a wide range of technologies. Thus, an experience base exists that companies trying to implement APS can draw on. In the 1990s, the APS market boomed and products proliferated. Consumer packaged goods companies like Procter & Gamble, Colgate, and Gillette started to use more APS at that time. Although there were some early adopters in this market segment, this industry as a whole was slower in using APS techniques. This is true of the paper industry as well, despite its sophisticated approaches for trimming paper and leftover materials.

A number of companies that had been able to implement relatively simple tools for manufacturing scheduling discovered they needed a more sophisticated approach to the number of SKU (stock keeping unit) and location combinations in their distribution networks and for their forecasting capabilities. The simple tools used to generate revenue forecasts choked on the number of SKU ...