As part of the next generation planning platform, APCC has a more real-time, event-based planning and execution system. This platform provides planners with more real-time visibility into real world changes that are occurring both within and outside the enterprise. With this knowledge, you can react and, if necessary, correct your plan before making any planning decisions.
The platform provides the ability to:
Capture key real-time events in the supply chain – both internal and external.
Define a set of business rules to filter, validate, and process each event.
React in real-time to the events, such as exceptions, alerts, and user actions.
Analyze these exceptions across plans or runs – to see trends, do an age-analysis, and so on.
A set of pre-seeded business events triggers workflows or processes that are validated against a set of user-defined rules. The rules include conditions that qualify the event as one that the planner is interested in viewing in real-time. There is a trade-off between having too many of those events, which could potentially increase the nervousness in the plan, versus too few events, which could lead the planner into making decisions on stale data.
An example of a typical use case of real-time planning within an enterprise is outlined below:
Starts off with a supply chain plan P1 based on a consensus forecast from Demantra.
A key component supplier likely to delay a major delivery (change in promise date).
The new due date on the Purchase Order is immediately reflected in APCC repository.
Alert generated in APCC based on a custom iBot that compares plan with real-time data.
User looks at iBot, talks to supplier, makes a note in APCC with plan, item, period context.
The iBot also generates a real-time exception which is then visible in APCC.
Optionally, the iBot can trigger a re-plan (in Rapid Planning) to analyze the full impact of the delay in the Purchase Order. The user can simulate an offload to alternate in a new version of the plan (P2) in Rapid Planning.
A comparison of the two versions of the plan (P1 & P2) is done in Rapid Planning (or Advanced Planning Command Center).
Plan P2 found better overall on metrics of fill rate versus gross margin. Resolution implemented.
All real-time updates and events are recognized when the source system, such as ERP, or Legacy, updates APS Operational Data Store (ODS) either through a batch collection program or a synchronous web service call.
The updates can be any of the following types:
Changes to due dates of open orders
New orders, cancellations, changes to qty
Updates to performance history on bookings, shipments, production and inventory
The following measures, which currently exist for a plan, are enabled for collected data in APCC:
Total Supply
Total Demand
Schedule Receipts
On-hand
Order Quantity
Resource Availability
Resource Requirements
Net Resource Availability
Cum Net Resource Availability
Resource utilization %
WIP start quantity
The concurrent program, Refresh Collected Data in APCC Repository, refreshes the APCC repository. The parameters for the concurrent program are:
Instance (required).
Complete. Valid values are Yes or No.
Yes: a full refresh of the repository is carried out.
No: an incremental refresh of the collected data is carried out.
The date range of the collected data that is available in APCC depends on the following two profile options:
MSC: Horizon for APCC Collected data - Forward days
MSC: Horizon for APCC Collected data - Backward days
Incremental Updates to Real-Time Data
In case of an incremental refresh, the logic is:
Identify the items or resources that have changed.
Rebuild the APCC repository for those items only, for all measures.
Rebuild all pre-aggregated data that are impacted by these items.