Supply chain planning software developer Adexa Inc. announced Monday the beta version of its Collaborative Operations Planning software, which helps companies plan and schedule for product demand.
COP, as the software is known, is geared to provide the missing link between operations planning and demand planning by ensuring that financial targets are considered during every phase of the planning process, according to Cyrus Hadavi, the Los Angeles-based companys president and CEO.
To achieve its ends, the COP application, due in the first quarter of 2004, dynamically considers all costs required for planning along with material and capacity constraints and identifies the most profitable plans and schedules to meet demand. The idea is that each transaction in an order can have higher or lower costs—depending on the costs of materials, manufacturing or subcontracting, for example—and what COP does is automatically measure the profitability of each step in the manufacturing process to develop a plan that is optimized to provide the best returns, officials said.
Once a demand plan is in place, a companys customers, distributors and partners can use the Internet to access and make changes to the plan. Any changes to the plan are propagated throughout the plan and reoptimized for profitability by the COP application.
The COP software is part of Adexas Enterprise Global Planning System suite, which is designed to help companies manage a range of operations, including factory scheduling, sales and inventory management, and supply chain planning. Tools in the suite manage product information and enable collaboration with suppliers, distributors and customers.