Manufacturing Theories: Advanced Planning & Scheduling

Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) refers to a manufacturing management process by which raw materials and production capacity are optimally allocated to meet demand. APS is especially well–suited to environments where simpler planning methods cannot adequately address complex trade–off's between competing priorities.

Traditional planning and scheduling systems (such as Manufacturing resource planning) utilize a stepwise procedure to allocate material and production capacity. This approach is simple but cumbersome, and does not readily adapt to changes in demand, resource capacity or material availability. Materials and capacity are planned separately, and many systems do not consider limited material availability or capacity constraints. Thus, this approach often results in plans that cannot be executed.

Unlike previous systems, APS simultaneously plans and schedules production based on available materials and capacity. This usually results in a more realistic production plan.
APS has commonly been applied where one or more of the following conditions are present:

• Make–To–Order (as distinct from make–to–stock) manufacturing
• capital–intensive production processes, where plant capacity is constrained
• products 'competing' for plant capacity: where many different products are produced in each facility
• products that require a large number of components or manufacturing tasks
• production necessitates frequent schedule changes which cannot be predicted before the event

Advanced Planning & Scheduling software enables manufacturing scheduling and advanced scheduling optimization within these environments.