Supply Chain Management and Advanced Planning

Rating:
Summary: State-of-the Art thinking on Supply Chain Management
Review: I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with the high quality and standard of the book, Supply Chain Management and Advanced Planning. It reflects state-of-the-art thinking as well as current views, and contains up-to-date case studies of supply chain management and advanced planning systems. There is no doubt that the authors are working at the cutting edge of the supply chain management field. They show intimate knowledge of practical advanced planning applications as well as implementation issues around a variety of commercially available software systems.

Recent information technology developments have changed modern manufacturing organizations dramatically. We have witnessed the introduction of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, such as SAP and BAAN, aimed at integrating internal processes in an organization. These systems cut across multiple functional areas and provide a corporate wide database with all the relevant data of an organization. Many believed that these systems would address all the problems and lead to drastic improvements of business performance. This focus on internal processes, however, was not sufficient since, in a sense, it was not able to cope with the exceptions and with the variability that confront organizations on a daily basis. State-of-the-art planning procedures, provided by Advanced Planning Systems (APS), are required to allow organizations to reduce the amount of exceptional situations. An APS exploits the environment created by ERP systems and this has created major breakthroughs in enterprise wide planning. The impact has spread wider to collaborative planning amongst supply chain partners. This book is devoted to Advanced Planning Systems, the concepts underlying these, the current limitations of APS, how it links and interacts with ERP systems, what is required for successful implementation, etc. Through using, testing and implementing APS modules developed by companies such as i2 Technologies, J.D. Edwards and SAP A.G., the authors gained many insights. Practical real-world experiences are captured in the various chapters of the book.

This book covers an immense quantity of Supply Chain Management material. It is presented in a logical and easily understandable way. Here and there it is obvious that the authors are not fully comfortable with English but it is not very distracting. The book is comprehensive and the different aspects of supply chain management are outlined in great detail. I found the book a real pleasure to work through. What impressed me most was the ease with which the authors of the various chapters dealt with complex and sometimes very interrelated supply chain aspects. From a personal point of view, the emphasis on quantitative tools to assist and improve planning was very encouraging. This is something that is not recognized and appreciated enough. This book is a must for every logistics professional. Buying this book will be a worthwhile investment!

Rating:
Summary: Good reference for advance supply chain management analyst
Review: It is very good reference for all analyst to have this book. It explain the detail configuration to achieve optimum supply chain effectiveness. At the end of this book, it introduces also solutions for advance planning by several high-end vendors such as J.D. Edwards etc.

Rating:
Summary: A very broad view of Supply Chain Management and APS
Review: This book will give every reader a very good view of the Supply Chain Management concepts. It will take the reader from the Strategic point of view, through the Demand Planning Systems to the Advance Planning Systems. A very good book to put every concept into a global perspective, with some case studies that will help the reader to make the transition from the theory to the pratical aspect of Supply Chain Information Systems.