APS for multinational companies: problems and prospects of development
The article presents the common architecture of the Advanced Planning System (APS). It shows that mathematical models and methods of linear programming, which are now applied for the master planning, are not able to solve a key problem of profit optimization for multinational companies. The paper also considers the evolution of mathematic models and methods used for optimizing profit after the tax in multinational companies. In current situation in order to optimize the supply chain of big multinational companies it is necessary to solve a problem of great dimensionality, because data matrices contain dozens of billions columns and lines and have bilinear and trilinear constraints. Approaches to parallelization of numeral algorithms for this problem are also under consideration. The main stress is on a most prospective approach which uses Big Data platforms for solving great dimensionality problems. Hereafter, the article defines the additional functionality of a supply chain design module and a demand planning module, so that APS could be of use in multinational companies. The authors also define the additional functionality of financial supply chain management modules and of neighboring ERPsystem’s controlling modules. It is shown that prospective APS for multinational companies should be developed on the basis of a complex of two integrated technology platforms: the In-Memory platform and the Big Data platform. The functional architecture of APS for multinational companies is presented in the context of the general enterprise management system as a whole. In addition, the architecture of APS master planning module is detailed one level deeper. It solves optimization problems for one time period, as well as for a finite number of time periods.