Time is the scarcest resource to humans. Planning is about making the most of a limited amount of time. By planning, humans try to control reality, by predicting and influencing actions that are expected to happen in the future. For companies, planning is essential for the efficiency and effectiveness of their value chain. The planning process is about making decisions on how to utilize capital intensive resources, assigning operators with the right skills, prioritizing customer orders, and the like. Therefore, planning determines what operational performance a company will bring to its customers.
Analyzing planning tasks is different from analyzing other tasks that are carried out in a company, because in planning, multiple outcomes are possible, and a planner has to construct a good alternative. A plan is basically an assembly of many pieces of information, all of them interrelated. Because planning tasks are complex, need to be performed under time pressure and have a large impact on the performance of companies, a specialized type of decision support systems has emerged to support these tasks: Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS). Since 2003, Twinlog has been supporting companies in improving their supply chain with Advanced Planning & Scheduling systems.
