Supply chain model based simulation and optimization

Supply Chain model based Simulation and Optimization in the field of needs planning, production scheduling and distribution as well as transportation is becoming more and more important, especially for companies which are strictly or mainly driven by customer orders. Customers ask for ever shorter delivery times, and delivery reliability has become a critical success factor for many companies, particularly for many SMEs. The paper deal with an intelligent toolset for modelling, simulation and optimization of supply chain management in connection with just in time production processes and distributions for user companies, which has currently considerable problems with their capacity utilisation: They have to reject many customer orders because they are often not sure if they have sufficient capacity available to meet the required delivery dates. On the other hand, capacity utilisation is in general only 60%. They expect that better planning and forecasting tools will enable them to take approx. 30% more customer orders, thus reaching a capacity utilisation of approx. 80% on average.