The OSP
software is designed with modules and
user interface
for modeling and analyzing the demand and supply planning process to
determine optimum strategic plans. The MS-Access database OSP.MDB contains the tables used in this modeling
and analysis.
The
Database
module
provides the procedures to model customer demand and the manufacturing
chain. It creates and maintains the tables for customer orders, sales
forecasts and
manufacturing
chain information, such as processes, products,
functions, machine types, product constructions, standards, and available
resources at each process.
The
Demand Planning
module
provides the procedures for maintaining the customer demand plans that are
set up in the Database module. These plans includes customer orders,
demand history from past shipment records, and sales or demand forecasts.
These forecasts can be user-generated or generated using a statistical
forecasting method provided in the module.
The
Supply
Planning module provides the
procedures to analyze customer orders and demand forecasts
to determine if schedules and production plans are feasible for each
planning period. Analysis will indicate processes where production
bottlenecks and product shortfalls occur, and the impact the schedule and
production plans will have on company resources such as
materials, machine utilization, direct labor,
variable costs, and variable margins.
The
Optimized Strategic Planning module provides the
procedures for determining optimum strategic plans. Optimum plans are
demand and supply plans with maximized or minimized objectives based on the
customer demand, constraints on manufacturing resources, and other
user-defined constraints across the manufacturing chain. These user-defined
constraints are items such as available machine capacities at each process,
and restrictions on products loaded on specific machine types at each
process.
A
demonstration model of a hypothetical manufacturer is available to
interested companies. The demonstration software also
contains general subroutines with examples for solving other Linear
Programming
problems
and Assignment problems using the
Hungarian Method.