Collaborative planning and decision - making aid in supply chan management

The proposal includes defining two decision-making aid methodologies in supply chain (SCs) planning. One is based on hierarchical production planning to plan the SCs’ mid-term operations according to groups of products and regions, which also considers possible groups according to different customer/delivery types; and all of this within a collaborative planning framework (Kilger & Reuter, 2,002). The other is based on a simultaneous multi-objective approach for strategic and operational planning, which will attempt to optimise simultaneously two planning levels by means of strategic and operational submodels.

For the former, an aggregation procedure of information and decision variables will be established. These aggregation procedures should take into account the different visions of resources, decisions, information, tasks. Planning by levels (hierarchical planning) will allow some plans to be made (on different horizons and with various levels of detail) for replenishment, production and distribution by establishing the planned customer satisfaction (Demand Planning (Rhode, Wagner, 2,002) in the Sales Area).

In the mid/short term, it seeks to define more detailed supply chain planning (replenishment, production, distribution), which includes the planning of inventories of finished goods in warehouses and distribution centres. Although we should consider transport between warehouses, and also between warehouses and plants, it is not considered herein.

It will also have to establish a master production schedule and a capacity plan between one or several production facilities. The objective is to take into account the costs of capacity and of inventories of modules, assemblies and parties; if there are several plants, the transport costs among several plants should be taken into account.