Collaborative Demand and Supply Planning Networks - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 500

by planners with insight in the particular supply
chain and know how on the system constraints
but likewise important: a feeling for feasibility
of created plans. Thus, APS aim to bridge the
gap between the supply chain complexity and
the day-to-day operative decisions. This requires,
however, that planners are able to model and setup
decision rules for the planning and optimization.
According to Petroni (2002) there are several
problems involved in using planning software such
as high complexity, lack of training and knowl-
edge among managers and personnel, low-data
accuracy, and lack of support from the software
vendor. Early adopters of APS report significant
reductions in cycle time, resource and inventory
load (OM Control, 2001; Schell, 2002; Hess,
2002). A study by Funk (2001) however, showed
that only 20% of the APS installations investigated
were successful (based on a threshold of achiev-
ing 70% of projected gain to become a success).
In spite of the supply chain functionality,
most APS implementations are limited to a single
organization or a single manufacturing site. A
few cases can be found in literature on success-
ful supply chain implementations. Gupta et al.
(2002), for example, describe a decision support
system which helps Pfizer to plan their distribu-
tion network. Another study from the Vita Group
show an increase in delivery accuracy from 79 up
to 99% while reducing lead time from 5-7 days
to zero and reducing the planning resources by
30% (Works Management, 2008).

as the combined capabilities of the suppliers that
make up the OEMs' supply chain. Therefore, the
only way to improve competitive advantage is
to improve those combined capabilities through
better integration - that is information exchange
across the supply chain. The challenge is to de-
velop and demonstrate an open, standards-based,
testing and integration infrastructure that enables
the automated exchange of information across the
supply chain. This infrastructure will provide the
foundation for new types of collaboration and
management and it will help propel both OEMs
and SMEs to a better competitive position in the
global marketplace.
The Work Bench Concept is an alternative
approach to enable such an infrastructure sup-
porting supply chain planning where decentralised
planning decisions are made with regards to indi-
vidual company operations - but with a network
perspective. The main functionality is to operate
and manage existing SMEs manufacturing net-
works. The work bench comprises components for
integration of information systems, visualisation of
the planning and production situation, communica-
tion to enable cooperative decision making under
uncertainty, optimisation of plans and simulation
of the decisions, network diagnostics and perfor-
mance monitoring among others. This involves a
number of challenges such as providing members
access to network-wide real time information
(Wang and Wei, 2007), enable visualisation of
the available information (Boyson et al., 2003),
secure the interaction between advanced ICT
based decision support tools and human decision
making (Barthélemy et al., 2002), and creating a
coordinated and collaborative environment (Deek
et al., 2003) for planning and decision making.
The state of the art, major challenges and identi-
fied requirements are listed in Table 2.
In the following section a supply chain plan-
ning approach to solve requirement 2 (Techniques
for solving distributed and dynamic planning) is
presented.

the Work bench concept

As pointed out by the US National Institute of
Standards and Technology, the 20th century,
competitive advantage was defined by the pro-
duction and labour capabilities of individual
original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). In
the mid 90s, OEMs sought to reduce those costs
by distributing those capabilities across a global
supply chain. Competitive advantage is now seen