Advanced Planning and Production Scheduling, APS, and Supply Chain Management, SCM, are becoming increasingly important in manufacturing companies, as they look to enhance their enterprise applications to take account of real-time status of suppliers, customers and their own plant.
There is a need for tools that will enable companies to react in a timely manner to events both upstream and downstream of their position within each of their supply chains.

Preactor 400 APS, 500 APS, 600 APS and Enterprise build on the finite capacity production scheduling core of Preactor to meet these needs. Planning and production scheduling across the supply chain, is a relatively new concept. It is an extension of other technologies that have been used to try and improve efficiency, such as Electronic Data Interchange, EDI, and SCM systems. Both EDI and SCM foster closer relationships between the companies within a supply chain, but it tends to be a one way relationship. For example EDI is primarily a way for a company to place orders on their suppliers. The ability of the supplier to produce the components is taken for granted, and for some, the advent of EDI simply pushed the necessary stock of components back up the supply chain. SCM goes a step further, but its major application areas have been in controlling stock in multiple warehouses for Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and food/drink manufacturers. In this role SCM attempts to maintain the required stock levels whilst deciding how, and from where, to fulfill particular customer orders.