What is Advanced planning and scheduling (APS)

Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems vary a great deal in their functionality and interaction with other systems, causing confusion as to what APS really is. The more advanced APS modules generally include constraint models for both materials and capacity. The latest technology has the capability to model not just a production plant’s operation, but an entire supply chain, including suppliers, multiple production plants, and complex distribution chains. This overview of the development of enterprise resource planning systems is necessarily a bit simplistic and leaves out much detail.

Advanced Planning & Scheduling (also referred to as APS and Advanced Manufacturing) 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-offs between competing priorities.

Traditional planning and scheduling (such as Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRP) 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. However, despite attempts to shift to the new system, attempts have not always been successful, which has called for the combination of management philosophy with manufacturing.

Unlike previous systems, APS simultaneously plans and schedules production based on available materials, labor and plant capacity.

APS has commonly been applied where one or more of the following conditions are present:

1. Make To Order (as distinct from make to stock) manufacturing
2. capital-intensive production processes, where plant capacity is constrained
3. products 'competing' for plant capacity: where many different products are produced in each facility
4. products that require a large number of components or manufacturing tasks
5. 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.