Planning Software

The big players in the chemical industry have developed very powerful company-specific ERP systems (enterprise resource planning earlier this type of system was denoted as production planning and control) since the 1960s. The growing costs to maintain and adapt these systems have motivated the move to integrated standard business software systems in the last decade. The majority of the big chemical companies use SAP R/3 resp. SAP ERP from SAP AG other well-known solution vendors include Marcam (now part of Infor) and JD Edwards (now part of PeopleSoft resp. Oracle). 

These software products are used company-wide and integrate all operational, business and financial information in huge databases. 

To integrate an organizational unit that uses multipurpose batch plants into the company, IT infrastructure with its ERP system, a hierarchical planning approach is most often used. Starting from a material requirements planning (MRP) run, capacity requirements are determined and roughly checked, although the check of the capacity requirements is not directly combined with the material requirements. 

In general the overall (company-wide) MRP run will create planned orders for the multipurpose batch plant which have to be further processed by the plant details planner. 

This task is generally denoted as a scheduling problem in mathematical publications (e.g., see [3]). 

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SUGGESTED PROCEDURE FOR EVALUATING EMERGENCY RESPONSE PLANNING SOFTWARE... 

In most cases known to the authors planning software is used in situations where in fact one has to deal with unsolvable planning problems (not enough capacity, requirement peaks, lack of workforce etc.). 

Khogeer (2005) developed an LP model for multiple refinery coordination. He developed different scenarios to experiment with the effect of catastrophic failure and different environmental regulation changes on the refineries performance. This work was developed using commercial planning software (Aspen PIMS). In his study, there was no model representation of the refineries systems or clear simultaneous representation of optimization objective functions. Such an approach deprives the study of its generalities and limits the scope to a narrow application. Furthermore, no process integration or capacity expansions were considered. 

In writing a preliminary financial analysis, the main point is to determine whether the business has sufficient margins and volume to justify a business. This can range from a simple back-of-the-envelope breakeven analysis to a more complete set of 3-year pro forma. More formal texts on entrepreneurship (Timmons, 1999), business planning short courses and workbooks (www.fasttrac.org), and business planning software (www.bplan.com) can be used on the more formal end of this planning spectrum. 

Supplier prequalification response Supplier audit report Project and quality plans Software quality assurance plan Commercial and purchasing specs. 

Project Quality Plan Software Quality Assurance Program Functional Design Specification Hardware Design Specification Software Design Specification Software Module Design Specification Software Review Software Module Test Records Hardware Test Records Integration Test Records Instrument Spccs/Data Sheets Instrument Calibration Records Material Certificates... 

While the previous description represents a generic implementation, specific vehicle routing applications may have their own individual characteristics, requiring that transportation management and shipment planning software be customized to reflect the operating environment, customer needs, and the characteristics of the transportation mode (Hall and Partyka 1997). 

For instance, one inbound and outbound optimization planning software package has the ability to manage shipments from multiple origins to multiple destinations and builds and consolidates loads as orders are imported into the system, using a library of transportation algorithms. Combined with a costing module, it rates, ranks, and selects carriers based on customer needs. 

Ability to interact with popular spreadsheet, computer-aided design, and process-planning software... 

For each phase, design documents of safety systems, based on SRP BTP-14, of the software development life cycle, include software plans, software requirement specification, software design output, source code listing, and test reports. These documents are subject to the IV V review. 

Examples Besides environmental optimization of process parameters (e.g., Mori et al. 2011), energy and resource efficiency measures are increasingly implemented in production planning software (e.g., Weinert et al. 2011 Herrmann et al. 2011). 

The reporting structures have also changed. In 2003, fewer than 10 percent of companies had a well-defined S OP organization. In 2012, three out of five projects for suppiy chain planning software were driven by a person with the S OP-specific title, and industry conferences dedicated to S OP abound. As a result, yesterday s S OP technology may not be up to the task. Organizational size and complexity are major considerations. 

The rationale for investing in supply chain management software systems is the same as that required for investment in material requirements planning and enterprise resource planning software systems. The goal is to reduce inventory levels while improving customer service. 

There are several merchandising planning software solutions commercially available. 

Today, special cut process planning software is used to improve the work planning process. It links together ERP (enterprise recourse planning), fabric management... 

SYNLIB, see Software appendix) and a combination of synthesis-planning software with literature reaction retrieval software is a powerful tool for synthetic chemistry. 

From these uncertainties, a good planning software is able to determine the applicable calculated buffer times. 

As it is seen in Table 2, the results for sector blocks are far from satisfactory. This is a problem that may have several causes (e.g. the geometrical diversity of different sector blocks or the quality of the neural network planning software used) which are out of the scope of this paper and are to be dealt with in another research project. To eliminate the problem temporarily, a smaller set of sector blocks was considered, which involved only the West (W) and East (E) sector blocks, each built up of five elementary sectors. For the neural networks of Set B and Set C these were the only sector blocks used by default. 

The more accurate the demand forecast, the better a company can prepare in advance of demand occurring. Not only does this reduce the need for last minute responses to unexpected demand, it also helps to cut the cost of preparing for demand that might never occur. However, it is probably impossible to anticipate demand fully and correctly at all time horizons and in all markets, for all products and services - even if the IT systems support, such as forecasting tools and enterprise resource planning software, were perfect. There are several management approaches to forecasting that will enhance its accuracy and relevance. These include ... 

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