The OSP software is designed with modules and user interface for modeling the demand and supply planning process and analyzing the customer demand 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.  The demand 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 objective functions 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. 

The Replenishment Planning module provides the procedures for replenishment orders after optimum schedules have been determined.  Replenishment is initiated at the marketing level through the submission of an optimized forecast of demand by product to the manufacturing team. The forecasts and orders have been consolidated and analyzed to assess projected supply/demand balance.  They are based on both optimized data and market intelligence. With these forecasts of demand, replenishment orders are determined based on on-hand inventory, on order items, back order items, and the desired safety stock level. The replenishment cycle can be done weekly or monthly.

A demonstration model of a hypothetical manufacturer is available on CDs to interested companies.  .