FOS: An Advanced Planning and Scheduling Suite for Service Operations

Abstract

Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) has been a well-known term in manufacturing being used to refer to supply chain management suites and, more specifically the forecasting, planning and scheduling applications within them. However, the applicability of that part of ERP/SCM systems has been so far limited to product-driven industries. Despite the increased importance of services, integrated APS systems for service operations are yet to emerge from the main enterprise software vendors. In this paper, we present Field Optimisation Suite or FOS for short. FOS is an integrated APS platform for service operations. The platform is underpinned by operations research techniques for tackling complex decision making problems