Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Health care management
Reexamination Certificate
1995-06-16
2001-02-13
Voeltz, Emanuel Todd (Department: 2761)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Health care management
C705S014270
Reexamination Certificate
active
06188989
ABSTRACT:
TECHNICAL FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates in general to the fields of demand management, supply chain management, and capacity management. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for managing available-to-promise product (ATP) and making promises to fulfill customer requests.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Manufacturers produce products for sale to customers. In the sales process, customers place demands on manufacturers. A customer demand may consist of a request for a particular quantity of a product by a specific date. This date and quantity information may be collectively referred to as the “customer request” or “request information”.
Manufacturing and distribution facilities have limited resources (capacity)and limited inventories (materials). Therefore, every customer request may not be satisfiable in that some may receive no promise, others may receive an inadequate one. Planning and managing which customer requests to promise and fulfill, termed “demand management”, is a fundamental and critical activity of most manufacturing and distribution organizations.
Due to material, capacity and other limitations, a manufacturer may not be able to meet a particular customer request. In this situation, the manufacturer typically negotiates with the customer to deliver a quantity of product by one or more dates agreeable to the customer. This date and quantity information may be referred to as the “manufacturer promise” or “promise information”. Based on the manufacturer promise, the manufacturer creates operational plans to implement the promise information. Manufacturers may use a combination of diverse software tools in the negotiating and planning processes.
Traditional methods for demand management have several problems. First, such methods and systems are not integrated. Several different tools may be required to implement the entire demand management strategy. Second, such traditional systems and methods are not dynamic. Once a plan is in place, it is difficult for the manufacturer to react to changing circumstances and update the plan. Third, order promising to customers is often done based upon an infeasible plan. Later attempts to find a feasible plan that will satisfy the promises are often futile.
The environment today requires more and more responsiveness. Customers require significant product diversity and want promises to be made to their requests immediately, while on the phone. The traditional way of promising in configure-to-order or make-to-order environments involves submitting the request to the planners and then, a few days or weeks later, after the planners have gone through a planning cycle, receiving a promise or rejection.
Many manufacturing and distribution organizations have several sales offices associated with each manufacturing factory. Each sales office independently promises to supply products from the factory to customers. This is referred to as a “distributed organization”. Each sales person in each of the sales organizations needs to be able to make instantaneous promises, simultaneously with other sales people doing the same. In addition, each of those promises need to be fulfillable by a feasible plan.
To better meet customer demand, the manufacturer must build product and/or intermediate items before receiving customer orders. This production is based on projections called “forecast orders”. A product produced based on these forecast orders is referred to as “available to promise” or “ATP”. ATP consists of quantities of products with associated dates that the products are scheduled to be available for delivery to the customer.
In distributed organizations a sales office may need approval from the factory before ATP may be promised to meet a customer request. This approval process may take up to a week under current practices. This delay is unacceptable in today's business environment.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
In accordance with the present invention, a system and method for managing available to promise product (ATP) is provided that substantially eliminate or reduce disadvantages and problems associated with previously developed systems and methods.
More particularly, one embodiment the present invention provides a method for managing ATP in a distributed organization. The distributed organization comprises at least one supplying facility such as a factory. Additionally, the distributed organization comprises a plurality of requesting facilities for each supplying facility. The requesting facilities may comprise, for example, sales offices. The requesting facilities and the supplying facilities may be coupled by a computer network.
In this embodiment, the requesting facilities each store forecast orders in a memory of a computer at the requesting facility. The forecast orders include request information. As defined previously, the request information includes the quantity (or range of quantities) of product requested from the supplying facility and the date (or range of dates) it is needed. A master scheduling software system may be used to selectively plan use of, for example, manufacturing capacity of the supplying facility to meet selected forecast orders based on predetermined criteria. If a feasible and desirable plan can be devised that satisfies the request, then the supplier may make a promise to the customer that the supplier will satisfy the request. The promises to meet the selected forecast orders may be transmitted directly to the customers over a computer network.
In environments where customers are not willing to wait for a plan to be developed to get a promise, the supplying facility must create promises in advance that are available for immediate transfer to a customer. In this embodiment, future requests can be forecasted and a plan can be made to satisfy and promise those forecast requests. When an actual customer request is received, one or more (or a portion of) promises made to forecast requests may be instantly reassigned to the customer request.
A technical advantage of the present invention includes the ability in a distributed organization with distributed sales people to allocate some of the promises made to forecast requests to certain sales people, thereby preventing them from simultaneously using the same forecast promise as a promise to a customer, without requiring them to check with each other before making promises. In this embodiment, each sales organization or person can be modeled and each forecast request/promise can be allocated to one such sales entity.
Another technical advantage of the present invention is that the allocation of promises may also be done for business management reasons. For example, a sales organization may be allocated promises based upon how much they are willing to commit to selling. This embodiment allows each sales entity to create its own forecast of what it could sell and establish the level it is willing to commit to selling. Forecast requests are then generated from the committed levels. Promises made to those requests become allocated to that sales entity for it to use to form promises for customer requests.
A further technical advantage of the present invention is that it allows these sales entities to be organized into hierarchies (for example, sales person within sales office within marketing organization). Promises that are allocated to a sales organization can be used by the sales people within that organization. Coordination is required in such cases to ensure that two sales people do not consume the same promises. But where such coordination is feasible, it is typically desirable to have some allocations that are common among them.
Another technical advantage of the present invention is that customer requests that cannot currently be promised can be queued. As conditions change, the queued requests have the first opportunity to be promised. Without such a queuing mechanism, requests that cannot be promised are forgotten. When new capacity frees, the next customer that happens to make a request gets that newly freed ca
Baker & Botts L.L.P.
i2 Technologies, Inc.
Kalinowski Alexander
Todd Voeltz Emanuel
LandOfFree
System and method for managing available to promised product... does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with System and method for managing available to promised product..., we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and System and method for managing available to promised product... will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-2584570