Decision support for material planners

Control parameters, such as order frequency, safety stock and safety time, are important tools to improve the logistic performance in material planning. In practice, the adjustment of control parameters appears to be very difficult. One of the reasons is the lack of relevant tactical control information: a simple, periodical and per-commodity integrated feedback of performance and process information often is not available to the logistic operator. Therefore, the material planner is offered a fairly limited overview and insight of the processes to be controlled. This problem has been investigated in several plants in the Netherlands. A solution to this problem is first to measure the performance, the frequency of process disturbances and the effect of the parameters on performance for all commodities involved. And second, to integrate this information and provide feedback to the responsible material planner. In this article a design for decision support is presented to integrate and give feedback of relevant tactical control information. Prototype information systems are now being tested in practice and in the laboratory. The expectation is that this type of decision support will help the operator to make more systematic and effective diagnoses.