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  Supply Chain Management
  Supply Chain Management SCM Sales Forecast
  Supply Chain Management SCM Planning
  Supply Chain Management SCM APS Advanced Planning Scheduling

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This is the action of planning and coordinating the company’s resources in order to get maximum profit. Planning relies on the following input of information:
  Future needs (sales forecasts)
  Capacity during the weeks and months (per factory and production line and per storage centre),
  Existing stock coming from the supplier, and their future quantities.
  Particular opportunities and threats to certain companies (truck fleet, programmed purchases...).
Planning is mainly that which concerns the distribution and stock network and factory production. The calculation range (or horizon) is equal to the time it takes to produce a product having the longest route in the company’s production cycle, that is to say: three months (in order to allow for the supply of parts coming from the furthest possible distance).
Taking into account the existing stock information, the needs forecasted and a certain number of other parameters (the safe level of stock, the quality of customer service, the quality of the forecasts), the planning tool determines the quantities to produce in relation with other parameters (availability or not of the production lines, materials, human resources...).

What are the advantages to the company?
  Improving the level of customer satisfaction (reducing stock shortage and respecting delivery dates...);
  Improving profitability (reducing stockpile, deleting obsolete stock, better managing end of product life cycle...);
  Optimising the company’s resources (optimum use of human resources as well as that of capacity of stock and of production...);
  Reducing clearance time (guaranteeing reactivity on the market, in order to bring forward delivery dates) ;
  Putting in place an organisation and transversal communication, optimising the efforts of the Management.

From an organisational point of view:
  it is necessary to validate the sales forecasts upstream of this planning, in order to make a firm calculation that will not be doubted thereafter;
  the updating is generally done on a weekly basis and the result is named Production Guide Program Management, and this is issued directly from the company’s strategic plan (better known under the name of Industrial and Commercial Plan, which has a range of 18 months);
  planning is the result of collective and transversal work orchestrated by the Supply Chain Manager.