The technology enabling this vision is available. The key to this vision is integration and the first step is to integrate the supply chain along all the planning layers. These systems give companies the capability to feed more sophisticated demand forecasts to planning systems and provide a common foundation for data capture, financial reconciliation, order processing, and process analysis and measurement. Although these IT investments are often quite substantial, they serve as genuine initiatives to untangle the web of systems from the prior eras and replace them with consistent data and business processes. But ERPs are only one step toward integrated planning.
Technology is now available to enable continual optimization and communication.
In the downstream industry, the standard for optimization has historically been LPs, which have evolved and broadened over time from complex refinery optimization to strategic planning support. And it is difficult to consider the timing of demand for various products to determine when to produce a given product. The vision involves optimizing along the entire supply chain. No single tool can enable the vision and no single algorithm or optimization tool is the best for the full range of applications that constitutes an integrated planning architecture. The key is to determine the best mix of tools to address specific supply chain challenges.