The TROPOS Demand Management module provides powerful facilities to manage demand from customers, warehouses, R&D etc. It consolidates the demand in the optimum way for production taking account of batching rules, current stock levels and process capabilities and, where appropriate, can spread the demand across multiple production sites to maximise resource usage and minimise production and transportation costs.

A variety of batching rules allow the user to optimise the quantities of finished goods and intermediate product production to meet the economies of scale while ensuring that excess stock is avoided.

TROPOS allows a forecast to be raised at an intermediate product level as well as the finished goods level. This, when coupled with flexible forecast consumption logic, allows the forecast to be maintained at an appropriate level of detail to drive the production of intermediate products, firm sales orders can then be used to drive the finishing and packing processes. This de-coupling of the supply chain leads to shorter customer lead times and better customer service.

The TROPOS Demand Management module uses the demand, forecast and batching rules to create a Tentative Production Schedule (TPS) which can then be used by the TROPOS Scheduling module which creates a capacity constrained Master Production Schedule (MPS). The MPS can be used to constrain customer promises and to ensure that all promises within a user-defined time frame are met by planned production or current stock levels. Any changes to the production schedule which compromise these promises are highlighted for urgent attention.

• Multi-Plant, Multi-Warehouse Demand Consolidation
  • Warehouse-specific provisioning parameters
  • Production Site Load Profiles
  • Site and Warehouse transportation times and costs matrix
  • Reservation of production to Warehouse and Customer
  • Warehouse Transport Schedules
• Batching Rules
  • Lot for Lot
  • Economic Order Quantity
  • Time Period Batching
  • Optimum Process Quantity
  • Minimum Order Cost
  • Reorder point control
  • Automatically calculated Safety Stocks
• Forecast Management
  • Planning Bills of Materials
  • Forecast by Business, Customer, Territory, Representative, Warehouse and Non-specific combinations
  • Forecast in different time buckets to production plan
  • Daily, weekly, calendar monthly and period monthly forecasts
  • Consume intermediate product forecast by finished product orders
  • Forecast Consumption Spreading Rules
  • Forecast dropping or roll-up at user defined time fences
  • Forecasts can be maintained externally to TROPOS in existing specialised forecasting models and using the integration toolkit imported into TROPOS
  • Using the TROPOS integration toolkit, provisional customer demand received through EDI or similar can be imported into TROPOS for production and despatch planning
  • De-coupled Supply Chain
• Order Promising
  • Constrained by Stock and MPS
  • Based on intermediate product availability
  • Delivery Targets by Product, Market Sector and Territory