Quintiq ThoughtWorthSharing Business
To continue on my previous post, things started to get exited in the 1990s. I remember when I left university in 1997, and the timing seemed to be right to get engaged in the new trends: Supply Chain Management, Advanced Planning & Scheduling. In the 1990s, the term ERP was introduced, replacing MRP-II, to indicate enterprise information systems that were growing in functionality. Where such systems originally only offered support for financials and production, they now offer a wide range of functionality, such as plant maintenance, project management, human resource planning, and manufacturing execution.
However, the planning engine of ERP systems today still is based on MRP-I (with the additions of MRP-II, which were, as I think, not very helpful).
In the 1990s, an enormous growth could be seen in the number of suppliers of FCP (Finite Capacity Planning) systems, and the term APS (Advanced Planning & Scheduling) was introduced to replace the term FCP. But something else changed as well: APS suppliers not only focused on scheduling problems anymore (which was their classical focus area) but also on other production control levels such as Network Design, Sales and Operations Planning, Master Production Scheduling, Transportation Planning. In the picture below, on the left we can see the situation where APSses were used in the classical way, adding some scheduling functionality 'in between' ERP and MES. But more and more, APSses are offering a complete suite to cover all planning functions, where ERP does not have a planning role anymore, but instead is supplying the data.
In the 1990s, the market was hyping: huge benefits were promised by ambitious APS suppliers, combined with aggressive sales strategies. Many new vendors came on the market, which have by now disappeared, taken over, rebranded. In 2003, Quintiq entered this already quite competitive market, and we're still here today as one of the leaders!
In a future post, I will explain more about the situational conditions, that determine whether a company is 'ready' for APS.
