Directing the Flow of Product

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A Guide to Improving Supply Chain Planning
By Jeffrey H. Schutt
Hardcover, 6×9, 272 pages
ISBN: 1-932159-19-3
June 2004
Co-published with APICS

ISBN: 1-932159-19-3 Categories: , ,

Description

While good software and data are necessities for effective supply chain planning, the right processes, policies, and organization are the most powerful keys for reducing costs and providing high service. This book reviews the state-of-the-art in production and distribution planning and presents principles and methods through which enterprises, including virtual enterprises, can design the best way to plan their operations. Supply chain and virtual enterprise oriented, the book covers collaborative planning, lean philosophy, and newer techniques like ant algorithms. If you are looking for insight into how to improve operations through better planning, this book is the place to find it.

Key Features

  • Specifically refutes the idea that there is “one best way” that all enterprises should plan operations – an enterprise must design the best way to plan its operations.
  • Offers a methodology for designing and implementing new planning approaches based directly on the product flow decisions that have to be made, rather than on traditional planning categories
  • Provides practical guidance on implementing new planning techniques and managing data and systems and how to integrate collaborative planning with traditional approaches.
  • Presents unprecedented management perspective on planning philosophies and techniques, including mathematically “intense” versus simple approaches, MRP-type approaches, Operations Research approaches, and others.

About the author(s)

Jeffrey Schutt, Menlo Worldwide Technologies, holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. He has spent three decades doing strategic logistics planning, working closely with production and distribution planners to design and develop new planning tools and processes, and implementing packaged Supply Chain Planning software.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Product Flow Planning
Our Heritage of Planning Techniques
Principles of Product Flow Planning 
Planning Structures
Planning under Different Operating Philosophies and Supply-Demand Strategies 
Methodology: Creating Better Product Flow Planning 
Cases in Planning Structure Transformation 
Data and Systems for Planning Information or Optimization 
The Most Successful Planning Approaches