Planning and scheduling the value-added chain

The enterprise-wide optimisation of its value-added chain is performed using as target key performance indicators, KPI, that consider its business operation influence in the value added. A value-added chain can be seen as the value view of the supply chain. Having this in mind, new schedule strategies can be devised reshaping current developments for the supply chain management. The new approach is to perform an integrated and simultaneous financial/supply chain trade-off planning and scheduling optimising its economical/shareholder value. Consequently the result of this work is a decision-making tool for the optimal management of a value-added chain in manufacturing and process industries. The systematic deployment of more qualified information and the substitution of intuitive sequential decision making by simultaneous optimisation of activities could be the key of new enterprise-wide optimisation systems (Badell, 2001). Managers could make better business and technology decisions if they can use accurate simulation tools and timely process data to evaluate plans. The challenge is to obtain trade off solutions with common maximum performance measures while satisfying customers. This system gives to the financial-managers (company economist side), a tailor-made version of the scheduling tool helping them do their work. The overall simulation allows to test different alternatives during planning through a supply chain schedule with all the operation and financial information online with absolute transparency of the limitations and interactions occurring at plant and business level within each alternative. With this help it is possible to keep the visibility of the cumbersome interactions between the plant floor in multi-site levels and to change the today slave/blind position of business level during the supply chain decision-making procedures. The benefits of the value added chain management system are shown through a case study.