Advanced Planning

European Journal of Operational Research 163 (2005) 575–588 www.elsevier.com/locate/dsw

Invited Review

Supply chain management and advanced planning––basics, overview and challenges
Hartmut Stadtler
Fachgebiet Produktion & Supply Chain Management, Institut f€r Betriebswirtschaftslehre, u Technische Universit€t Darmstadt, Hochschulstraße 1, D 64289 Darmstadt, Germany a Available online 6May 2004

Abstract Literature on supply chain management (SCM) covers several disciplines and is growing rapidly. This paper firstly aims at extracting the essence of SCM and advanced planning in the form of two conceptual frameworks: The house of SCM and the supply chain planning matrix. As an illustration, contributions to this feature issue will then be assigned to the building blocks of thehouse of SCM or to the modules covering the supply chain planning matrix. Secondly, focusing on software for advanced planning, we outline its main shortcomings and present latest research results for their resolution. Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Supply chain management; Advanced planning; Advanced planning systems

1. Introduction Since the introduction of the term supplychain management (SCM) in 1982 (see Oliver and Webber, 1992) it has received ever-growing interest both in the literature as well as from industrial practice. A reason for this might be that it has so many facets and that the tasks of accomplishing the aims of SCM are so demanding that it is more an ongoing endeavour than a single short-term project. This broad scope of SCM incurs the difficulty offinding a suitable definition and description of the term. The aim of this paper is twofold: Firstly, we will provide an introduction to SCM by outlining

E-mail address: stadtler@bwl.tu-darmstadt.de (H. Stadtler).

those building blocks which incur some novel features for the management of (network) companies and hence play a major role in SCM. One of these building blocks, advanced planning,will be explained in greater detail. There are several commercial software packages available for advanced planning––so-called advanced planning systems (APS)––, which incorporate models and solution algorithms attributed to operations research. Since this paper also provides an overview of contributions to this feature issue we will assign these contributions to the building blocks of the houseof SCM or to the modules of an APS (see Sections 2.2 and 3.2). As we will see (Section 3) there is a general structure of APS which best can be visualized by positioning its modules in a two-dimensional table, the SC planning matrix.

0377-2217/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2004.03.001

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H. Stadtler / European Journal of OperationalResearch 163 (2005) 575–588

Secondly we are concerned with the future of APS. Therefore, we will highlight deficiencies of APS, which may give rise to future research. Three areas for improvements are proposed: Improvements which are possible within the modules of today’s APS, issues which challenge the premises of today’s APS, and last but not least two business functions are identified whichshould be better integrated with APS. The structure of the paper is as follows. In Section 2 the term SCM is defined and its building blocks are described. Section 3 introduces the architecture and modules of today’s APS. Issues and challenges of APS are presented in Section 4. A few comments conclude this paper (Section 5).

2. Essence and scope of supply chain management 2.1. The house of supplychain management Following the proposal of Christopher (1998, p. 15) a supply chain (SC) ‘. . .is a network of organizations that are involved, through upstream and downstream linkages in the different processes and activities that produce value in the form of prod-

ucts and services in the hand of the ultimate consumer.’ This definition stresses that all the activities along a SC should be...