Patent Document ID: 20020107819
Application ID: 09951334
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for enterprise planning and modeling that analyzes both goals influenced by physical constraints and strategic objectives which are independent of physical constraints comprising the steps of: defining the planning model by selecting decisions to optimize, the decisions being one or more selected items from the group consisting of price, promotion type, purchasing quantity, shelf space, and product assortment; defining primary goals based on physical limits, the primary goals being one or more items selected from the group consisting of profit, revenue, market share, risk-adjusted income, user defined goals and constraints on these items; selecting strategic objectives not based on physical limits, the strategic objectives being one or more items selected from the group consisting of price image, price index, service time, service level, risk, product availability, product selection, market share, revenue, and user defined strategic objectives; choosing an optimization method selected from the group consisting of tabu, simulated annealing, genetic algorithm, ant algorithm and user defined optimizations; calcuculating a plurality of scenarios based on historical sales data to model the primary goal and its interaction with the strategic objective; optimizing the calculated scenarios and displaying the results graphically as an optimum envelope of the primary goal versus strategic objective whereby effects of the strategic objective can be readily perceived.