Over the last decades, information systems (IS) for advanced planning and scheduling (APS, also known as Supply Chain Planning & Optimization) have undergone huge changes. Initially positioned as nearly magical tools that would optimize supply chains with the push of a button, expectations on APS are now more realistic: implementations can be very challenging, benefits may or may not be achieved as a result, integration with existing systems can bring headache to IS specialists. The book recently published by Springer “Designing, selecting, implementing and using APS systems” by Vincent Wiers and Ton de Kok attempts to increase the success rate of APS usage. Completely dedicated to APS systems, the concept of the book is new, while it builds upon work of others such as the seminal Springer book on 'Supply Chain Management and Advanced Planning' by Stadtler, Kilger and Meyr.

Location and route options

Program
15:00 hours
Herbert Meyr, Advanced Planning (& Scheduling) Systems between yesterday and tomorrow

15:40 hours
Ton de Kok, APS systems, uncertainty and feedback loops

16:20 hours
Vincent Wiers, What makes an APS project successful?

17:00 hours
Official handover of book to Will Bertrand

17:15 hours
Drinks

Abstracts

Herbert Meyr, Professor Supply Chain Management, Universität Hohenheim
Advanced Planning (& Scheduling) Systems between yesterday and tomorrow

The origins of Advanced Planning & scheduling Systems (APS) go back to the last millennium when capacitated planning alternatives to Material Requirements Planning modules of Enterprise Resource Planning systems have been extended to comprehensive software suites for supply chain planning. Important market players at this point in time like i2, Manugistics and Numetrix do not exist anymore. Nevertheless, today's buzzwords like Digitization, Industry 4.0, Machine Learning, Smart Home or Smart Enterprise necessitate automated and intelligent decision making. Have APS survived at all? If yes, which support can they nowadays offer? Will this suffice to fulfill the challenges of the future? The talk will survey the development of APS from their origins to the current status quo in order to lay solid foundations for a profound discussion of their future.

Ton de Kok, Professor Quantitative Analysis of Operational Processes, Eindhoven University of Technology
APS systems, uncertainty and feedback loops

APS systems support decision making where balancing demand and supply is complex due to uncertainty in processes and high-dimensionality in terms of number of resources and items. Uncertainty in processes fundamentally changes the nature of planning problems, as we illustrate by some examples. It also impacts the control loops by which we learn to manage the supply chain. We discuss the use of discrete event simulation when developing, testing and using APS systems.

Vincent Wiers, Eindhoven University of Technology/Twinlog B.V.
What makes an APS project successful?

The domain of APS is characterized by a large gap between academic research and practice. Academia focuses on developing algorithms that are for a large part not used in practice. Practitioners are therefore not so much guided by theories, but need to rely on experience and conceptual thinking. The presentation will focus on the success factors of APS implementations, based on the content of the book.