Collaborative Production Planning Services

Production Planning is the function of a manufacturing enterprise responsible for the efficient planning, scheduling, and coordination of all production activities. The planning phase involves forecasting demand and translating the demand forecast into a production plan that optimizes the company's objective, which is usually to maximize profit while in some way optimizing customer satisfaction. These twin objectives are not always synonymous. During the scheduling phase the production plan is translated into a detailed, usually day-by-day, schedule of products to be made. During the coordination phase actual product output is compared with scheduled product output, and this information is used to adjust production plans and production schedules

In COIN the challenges of defining collaborative Production Planning (C-PP) services are:

• To develop innovative services at disposal of manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) in collaborative networks (supply and distribution chain planning, inventory management, production planning and scheduling, manufacturing execution control);
• To take into account new technology enhancements in the field of distributed intelligence, product identification and networked devices;
• To integrate into existing planning and decisional systems the Web 2.0 principles of participation, democracy and “everything editable”, by achieving a real collaborative environment for production planning and scheduling.

COIN C-PP services are:

• PnP Collaborative Production Planning Platform (C3P): aim of the service is to provide a platform where, starting from a Business Opportunity, companies can easily plug themselves to the system, invite other partners and cooperate to the definition of the entire Production Plan, solving in a collaborative way exceptions, warnings, shipping and all the other related issues.
• SaaS Production Planning Service (PPS): the aim of this service is to provide a Production Planning system as SaaS service able to provide common functionalities such: Data Import service, execution of algorithms to calculate the feasibility of the production and needed time/price, Data output service, Warning and Exception service, etc.
• Collaborative Quality Management Service (CQMS): in Collaborative Networks participating organizations or individuals require additional inter-organisational quality initiative in order to meet and improve the demand for superior business opportunities. This is the mission statement of the innovative COIN service “cQMS”.
• Supply Chain Intelligence Services (SCIS): the service goal is to introduce services in the supply chain domain in order to provide better and more reliable decision support environment for this complex problem. More precisely, the aim of Supply Chain Intelligence services is to provide intelligent analytical, diagnostic and prediction services for transport of goods that will form a set of decision support tools to help decision makers, planners and other actuators in supply chain domain.