Directing the Flow of Product: A Guide to Improving Supply Chain Planning

While good software and data are necessities for effective supply chain planning, the right processes, policies, and organization are the most powerful keys for reducing costs and providing high service. This book reviews the state-of-the-art in production and distribution planning and presents principles and methods through which enterprises, including virtual enterprises, can design the best way to plan their operations. Supply chain and virtual enterprise oriented, the book covers collaborative planning, lean philosophy, and newer techniques like ant algorithms. If you are looking for insight into how to improve operations through better planning, this book is the place to find it.

Specifically refutes the idea that there is “one best way” that all enterprises should plan operations – an enterprise must design the best way to plan its operations.

• Offers a methodology for designing and implementing new planning approaches based directly on the product flow decisions that have to be made, rather than on traditional planning categories

• Provides practical guidance on implementing new planning techniques and managing data and systems and how to integrate collaborative planning with traditional approaches.

• Presents unprecedented management perspective on planning philosophies and techniques, including mathematically “intense” versus simple approaches, MRP-type approaches, Operations Research approaches, and others.

Preface
About The Author
Acknowledgments
About APICS
Web Added Value

Chapter 1. : Introduction to Product Flow Planning: Defining Our Context and Some Key Concepts
Chapter 2. : Our Heritage of Planning Techniques: The Tools in Our Toolbox
Chapter 3. : Principles of Product Flow Planning : The Foundation on Which We Build
Chapter 4. : Planning Structures: Concepts Underlying Our Design Work
Chapter 5. : Planning Under Different Operating Philosophies and Supply-Demand Strategies
Chapter 6. : Methodology-Creating Better Product Flow Planning: From a “Gleam in Your Eye” to Improved Operating Results
Chapter 7. : Cases in Planning Structure Transformation: Successes and Partial Successes
Chapter 8. : Data and Systems for Planning: The Computer’s Contribution
Chapter 9. : The Most Successful Planning Approaches: Elegant Simplicity and Other Reasonable Goals

References
Index