The turbulence of modern markets causes companies to pay more attention to reacting and less to forecasting and planning. The popularity of techniques such as lean management and outsourcing also stems from the fact that they make companies more flexible. As a result, enterprises adapt more quickly to market changes and gain significant competitive advantages as a result.
It would seem that with these kinds of management trends, one should not attach too much importance to detailed planning. However, it is easy to see that such an approach can quickly lead to dire consequences. It is a fact that sales and operations planning is currently burdened with a large margin of error. This does not mean that planning expenditures should be minimized. A more appropriate approach is to properly modify sales and operations planning systems so that they allow for rapid updating and integration of data from various sources. These systems must be dynamic and flexible. The realization of these postulates is made possible by modern software, provided, for example, by companies such as Manugistics, I2, or Mercia Software. And here a problem arises: the costs of implementing advanced IT solutions in the field of supply chain planning are high. For many small and medium-sized enterprises, the potential benefits may not justify such high expenditures. One can either abandon these investments or prepare for them better by improving the solutions already functioning in enterprises based on spreadsheets and simple databases. This article aims to demonstrate how one can cope, with the help of spreadsheets, with various computational requirements related to supply and production planning. Another benefit of the considerations contained herein may be that even when an enterprise possesses specialized planning software, it is often very useful to model the same calculations in a spreadsheet.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2002/3.