Software Selection

The two dimensions for the Supply Chain Management Process Matrix are the horizontal axis and the vertical axis. The horizontal axis represents the flow of materials through the organization, with supply-side activities on the left, production activities in the middle, and demand-side activities on the right. The vertical axis represents the levels at which these processes are managed, from the strategic through the tactical to the operational.

The ERP and APS are only similar by both being large-scale planning tools used by manufacturing organizations. The biggest difference between the two is that the ERP focuses on scheduling individual production facilities, whereas the APS is designed to manage entire networks of facilities operating in concert. Also, the ERP supports the lower two layers of business processes, largely ignoring the design process, whereas the APS supports the upper two layers, offering little support for operations. Looking at further comparison, the APS offers a comparable set of planning modules to those of the ERP, with many modules having the same names as their ERP counterparts. However, the planning offered by APS is different because APS uses advanced techniques that weren't available when ERP systems were first developed. APS uses a variety of mathematical procedures to find the optimal schedule for a given set of objectives. The ERP schedules everything as late as possible. Instead of taking a demand forecast as an input, as ERP does, APS provides a demand-planning module to help human planners calculate expected demand for each product in each region. With the APS model, changes can flow both up and down the planning stack. As with ERP, modifications to the master plan cascade down to lower-level modules, causing them to alter their detailed plans. But unlike ERP, changes in the lower-level plans are communicated upward to the master-planning module, which reworks the master plan to accommodate these changes. Also, APS has better planning tools than ERP, but APS is subject to some important restrictions. The APS systems can take into account a huge number of constraints on production and they can respond intelligently to situations in which there aren't enough materials, production capacity, or distribution options to handle the requested load. APS can automatically prioritize orders based on a number of considerations. It can also find the most profitable mix of products for any given plant, decide when to outsource production and distribution, and make other business tradeoffs. APS truly plans the supply chain as opposed to merely scheduling it.

Simulators can represent even the most complex, nonlinear relations, and they can accommodate any degree or type of variability in parameter values. They can model all the known sources of variability, and the results can be trusted to hold across all possible variation in these sources. They also provide more insight into the likely performance