Advanced Planning System (APS)

Business leaders see digital technologies as a means of improving decision-making in terms of resource allocation, load/capacity balancing, and arbitration in changing environments. 

The four main weaknesses of planning organizations are :

• the very intensive use of multiple local solutions based sometimes on dedicated solutions, but most often on Excel. Excel is simple, and solutions are easily developed with few technological barriers. But the solutions they generate are static, and require permanent data transfer to and from Excel.
• Too often, forecasting is not based on a robust, tested model. Parameterization is questionable and rarely maintained. The qualitative expert knowledge of the forecaster quickly takes over, playing a necessary but often excessive role.
• basic information is generally of poor quality. If it is heterogeneous in its source (ERP at the base, and WMS, CRM, etc.), it is difficult to aggregate. They are managed on an ad hoc basis, and the transition to a continuous flow of data is a real difficulty.
• the ability to change when it comes to planning is low. The less standard processes are, the more they are based on local practices, and the more the company is dependent on single individuals.

Several solutions  :

• work towards more complete integration, in particular by taking greater account of the finance and management control component.
• find solutions to facilitate the implementation of real-time control loops with more permanent data flow exploitation.
• broaden the range of skills that can be mobilized by finding ways to bring in skills from outside the company.

Traditionally, operations planning has been handled by internal processes and skills. At a good level of maturity, it relies on Advanced Planning System (APS, SAP, Oracle, Dynasys…) tools with the following characteristics :

• shelf-mounted and configurable
• on premisehosted by the company itself
• expandable through successive projects
• investment in Capex, the company having purchased a license

Another choice is offered by constrained planning solutions (Anaplan, Decision Brain, etc.), which are customizable toolboxes that enable you to build your own optimization solutions and integrate them into your business perspectives. 

And IBP solutions are more extensive, linking APS/planning under constraint with a more assertive finance and management control dimension. In particular, this will enable us to assess the consequences of ” what if ? ” scenarios.

The development of these tools requires extreme vigilance, and two principles should be kept in mind to avoid setbacks :

• beware of the illusion that the quality of a pilot’s results can give rise to. 
• acquire control over the supply of the tool with a flow of clean, synchronized, long-term data. A major shift is taking place towards ” SaaS cloud based ” solutions, opening up two very rich opportunities.
• the customer-user frees himself from IT issues and focuses solely on the business value-added dimension.
• co-construction of solutions in two dimensions: IT and the planning business.

We need to know how to bring together the same planning team to try to move on to a more efficient planning stage :

• technical mastery of the tool
• control of permanent, standardized and cleaned flows 
• business capacity for detailed analysis of scenarios and their alternatives
• ability to raise the bar by integrating the IBP component