Reducing the Challenge of using an Optimizer for Planning in Supply Chain Management
Heinrich Braun, SAP
From the standpoint of operations research, it is a challenge to develop a high-performance optimizer for planning in supply-chain management. Given you succeeded therein, it is a great challenge for the customer to use such a magic engine. In my talk I will present the optimization architecture of the SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer and the lessons learned for reducing customer effort in its daily use: solving their large supply-chain management planning problems. In particular, I will discuss: explanation tool: reasoning about only partially fulfillment of demands; cost setting: generating an solution quality indicator (i.e. the objective function) out of business goals; accelerating the performance: administering the power of a PC cluster by grid computing.
