۱- INTRODUCTION

۲- METHOD

۳- BACKGROUND

۴- CASE STUDIES

۵- TODAY’S STATE OF PLANNING

۶- CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION

REFERENCES

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been a major advancement in production planning and control (PPC), building on material requirements planning (MRP) and manufacturing resource planning (MRP II). To improve planning solutions, advanced planning systems (APS) have been offered since the nineties. Despite these developments and recent developments in digitalization, spreadsheets still play a major role in PPC. This paper describes three cases in which different capacity planning and production scheduling decisions are supported by spreadsheets. This results in a list of issues arising from the use of spreadsheets in PPC. While the advancements in PPC research have been clear over the last twenty years, the cases do not make use of these advancements in practice and we do not foresee that all spreadsheets will be replaced by APS or other digitalization efforts over the years. Therefore, while we focus more research efforts on concepts like digitalization and Industry 4.0, we must not forget that spreadsheet applications still dominates over ERP and APS as the main support for planners in their daily work.

INTRODUCTION

In this paper, we address the use of spreadsheets in today’s production planning and control (PPC). With spreadsheet application we mean the use of spreadsheets by human planners for the purpose of PPC, i.e. “to make a connection between supply and demand that will ensure the operations processes run effectively and efficiently and produce products and services that are required by customers.” (Slack et al., 2010) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are undeniable one of the greatest advancements in PPC, building on the foundations of material requirements planning (MRP) and manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) based systems since the nineties. Digital record keeping in which operational activities update both inventory and accounting information, make ERP systems very valuable to PPC. (Robert Jacobs and Weston, 2007) It is, however, not a customized planning system per se, and the capabilities of provided MRP modules are too limited to provide the planning support that planners need. ERP can provide initial plans, but often do not provide tools that help the planner in analysis and updating the proposed planning. This is supported by an empirical study by Fransoo and Wiers (2008) in which planners largely neglect ERP system proposed production orders, in which the number of manually created production orders increases when planning complexity increases.