Supply chain integration has long been a subject of significant attention from both logistics theorists and practitioners. The benefits achievable through improvements in this area are widely recognized.
Proper functioning of procedures related to sales and operations planning plays a particularly important role in integrating the supply chain. The exchange of information regarding the planned flow of goods and services is crucial for ensuring smooth cooperation between individual links and increasing the efficiency of the entire chain.
However, when presenting requirements for planning cooperation between companies within a supply chain, an equally important issue is often forgotten: the organization of planning within a single enterprise (link). Meanwhile, the issue of planning integration is also highly significant and difficult to implement in this area. There is often such a great diversity of methods and tools, so many variables and parameters, and such a complex flow of information that constructing an effective planning system becomes a real challenge.
Figure 1 presents a simplified view of the basic components of a sales and operations planning system in an enterprise. As can be seen, even despite the simplifications adopted, it is a fairly complex structure.
Creating an effective planning system is particularly difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises. When creating a planning system, they must overcome the same problems and often incur disproportionately high costs compared to large companies, while the potential benefits are correspondingly smaller. As a result, the planning systems of such enterprises are not properly developed, which leads to problems such as: aging inventory, lost sales opportunities, sub-optimally utilized resources, non-value-adding costs, etc. Another negative consequence can be excessive dependence on other companies participating in the supply chain.
Therefore, the purpose of this article is to present a simple methodology aimed at helping small and medium-sized enterprises construct and implement an effective planning system. In other words, this article is an attempt to formulate a recipe for a planning system. Such a recipe must be quite general –
not because of limited space, but because of the great diversity of enterprises. Furthermore, despite this generality, it is to be feared that for some specific cases it will still be too detailed. Therefore, what is more important here are not ready-made solutions, but the path to them.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 3/2003.