Setting Up an APS Scenario

To be competitive today, manufacturers need to do more with less, by reducing inventory and manufacturing costs without jeopardizing customer service.

Planning must focus on customer demand, fulfilment by the customer due date and synchronizing the flow of material and capacity accordingly.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) is the technology gateway to a more efficient use of production resources for both process and discrete manufacturers. 

An APS software system enables planners to automate, optimize, and compare production plans and schedules that reflect actual resource capacity and material availability, synchronize across plants and work centers to accurately manage labor and inventory, and meet delivery dates and increase profitability.

APS tools differ from traditional planning and scheduling tools in that they are not bound to a strict mathematical formula, but rather can tradeoff between a number of factors to find the best solution from many alternatives. That ability to weight multiple factors and find an overall best solution is called optimization.

APS is especially well-suited to environments where simpler planning methods cannot adequately address complex trade-offs between competing priorities.

Planning of order-related production orders requires other planning parameters and information such as resource planning for storage-oriented work orders. This chapter will explain how to create different scenarios.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to set up an APS scenario, understanding the main fields in its master data for production planning and scheduling.