Event-driven Planning of Supply Chains:
Approaches, Methods, and Use Cases
Introduction
Processes for mid- to short-term supply chain planning in Advanced Planning Systems (APS) are
typically performed in regular intervals. Due to increasing competition and a more volatile business
environment, companies could benefit from event-driven planning approaches in two respects: (1)
market-oriented planning that tracks demand/supply-side signals and correspondingly adapts
deviating plans, (2) (near) real-time planning facilitated by improved technologies (e.g. SAP HANA) to
quickly respond to external customer requests and internal incidents. Various approaches and
methods for event-driven supply chain planning have been proposed in the literature. The goal of
this thesis is (1) to develop a comprehensive and systematic overview on corresponding approaches
and methods, and (2) to evaluate potential use cases and areas of application from an industry
perspective (e.g. process industry or retail).
Objective
The objective of this master thesis is twofold:
•
•
Identifying relevant mid-/short-term planning problems along different supply chain
topologies that are amenable for an event-driven planning approach; outlining current stateof-the-art approaches and methods including a critical review
Identifying areas of application and describing exemplary use cases for an event-driven
planning approach using both literature and a series of interviews with industry experts
Introductory Reading
•
•
Dickersbach, J.T. (2009): Supply Chain Management with SAP APO: Structures, Modelling
Approaches and Implementation of SAP SCM 2008, 3rd ed., Berlin (Springer).
Lautenschläger, M. (2008): Event-based Planning for Standard Polymer Products, in: Stadtler,
H. and C. Kilger (Eds.), Supply Chain Management and Advanced Planning – Concepts,
Models, Software, and Case Studies, 4th ed., Berlin (Springer), pp. 481-494.
For further questions please contact Prof. Hahn (hahn@bwl.uni-mannheim.de).