SoReMa

Procurement to stock is still very important for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Due to their market position SMEs usually lack alternative procurement concepts like Just-In-Time or consignment stocks even for material with medium and high value. The traditional trade-off between a high service level and low inventory costs is today amplified by an increasingly dynamic cooperate environment, bottlenecks in supply on the procurement side and a more and more difficult acquisition of loan capital. Therefore, material requirements planners face the question of how to react to changes within cooperate environment properly.

Before configuring the material planning method appropriately, the fundamental decision for an either consumption- or demand-driven material planning logic needs to be made. Currently, there is no valid and comprehensible decision support for the planner. Existing approaches are either rather imprecise, since they don’t consider the relevant parameters sufficiently, or are hardly comprehensible like advanced planning systems. This leads to gut decisions without specific awareness of the consequences regarding service level and inventory costs, and a deviation from the aimed results.

This project aimed to develop a valid and comprehensible decision support for choosing a material planning logic, according to the respective situation and the defined objectives. Further, the decision support should be combined with existing, adaptive material planning methods within present IT-systems. Thereby a self-optimizing procurement characterized by the interaction between material planner and IT-system should be reached and enable a dynamic adaption to the dynamic environment.