# Master Production Schedule in the Consumer Product Goods Industry: Benefits of APS Applications
## 2 Materials and Methods  
The well-known concept of MRP II (Manufacturing Resource planning) encompasses a set of processes and methods for effective planning of all available resources of a production company. A fundamental idea underlying the MRP II concept is that the development of product and production must be planned in part long before there is actual customer (internal or external) demand. Some authors propose a planning hierarchy, namely three-level planning according to temporal range, a typical feature of the MRP II concept:  
* Long-term planning: Master planning
* Medium-term planning: Detailed planning and scheduling
* Short-term planning & control: Execution and control of operations:  
1. Sales and distribution
2. Research and development.
3. Production
4. Procurement  
Long-term planning (Master planning is another term used for long-term planning) takes place several weeks or months to a year before realization depending on market and industry. The main aim is to forecast the total demand for specific products and processes that will be placed into production from the outside or on the logistics network by internal or external consumers. The production company can then derive quantities and acquire the resources that are necessary to meet the expectations of the demand. These might be persons, production infrastructure, or deliveries from third parties. Medium-term planning timeframe concerns the range of months to weeks. Its purpose is to forecast demand in more details with a higher level of precision along the time axis. Demand for resources must correspond to the resources probably available at certain times. Consequently, sourcing agreements that were reached during long-term planning might have to be precision tuned or modified. Short-term planning and control concern the actual servicing of orders. It represents the short-term temporal horizon of the days or weeks during which physical logistics take place, see Figure 1[16; 19; 20].  
The Master planning schedule (MPS) case described further in this paper is based on data from the consumer products industry, specifically beverage production. Beverage production is usually make-to-stock. As mentioned in the introduction, MPS can be calculated by an ERP solution. The biggest benefits of these kinds of solutions are:  
1. Integration--Integration of various business processes into a single system, so MPS calculations are aligned with other business processes.
2. Basic planning--EPR solutions provide basic MPS calculations. This fits to production companies with straightforward processes.
3. Data Synchronization  
Despite the benefits of MPS calculated by ERP, several software vendors, like Siemens, offer dedicated software solutions for advanced planning and scheduling. These solutions provide several benefits, such as:  
1. Advanced Optimization--dedicated planning software uses sophisticated algorithms for production optimization.  
Figure 1: Manufacturing planning & control processes (own processing according [19]).  
2 Flexibility and focus on details--APS solution provides more flexibility while planning and can handle more complex production environments with multiple constraints.
3 Scenario Analysis--dedicated planning software allows to create what if scenarios [3; 7; 21].