Advance Planning & Scheduling APS

Category of software packages intended for the supply chain resources planning, at various horizons of time. Planning systems of all company flows (materials, information and financial) which synchronize and optimize activities and their interfaces, in a global and collaborative way, according to customer service rate objectives and margins on activities.

APS are bound to the production management processes and more particularly to the components repartition and the production capacities allocation so as to optimize the order satisfaction. These applications aim it to optimize the supply chain from the forecast order up to the final transport through production and supplies planning.

Traditional planning and manufacturing means management methods work "step by step" to allocate means and resources. These methods major drawback is their rigidity in front of the order, capacities and resources availability evolutions.

They don’t take into account constraints type such as: capacity limit, unavailability, etc…

APS organize the production according to these availability and capacity constraints to adapt the resources utilization and define production schedules.

The scope of APS includes order, supplies, manufacturing, storage and distribution.

Therefore, the optimization is global by playing on all of these domains rather than trying to optimize every process in an independent way.