Coordinated production planning in supply chains

The objective of supply chain management is the improvement of the material flow between the linked enterprises by installing information systems and procedures in order to enhance the coordination in the logistic chain. Planning the production and order quantities is a fundamental and decisive process for material flows in a supply chain. Therefore the coordination of these decisions is of great importance to its efficiency. One way to improve the coordination consists in the construction of a central production planning system for the entire supply chain. This shall complete existing ones used in the diverse enterprises. Thereby the distinct scheduling systems used keep their autonomy to a large extent. Akin to ¿service providers¿ they are used by the central supply chain oriented production planning system (SC-PPS), which in this respect offers an information system that loosely links different PPS systems. The architecture, necessary for that, the needed data and the functionality are introduced and discussed.