Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML
The Supply Chain Engineering department offers decision support systems for managing the complexity along your supply chain
A wide variety of data such as forecast delivery schedules, shipping notifications, position reports or goods receipts accure daily along modern supply chains. The analysis, consolidation and interpretation of this data as well as the derivation of suitable measures, such as express shipping, is becoming increasingly difficult for humans due to the large amount of data and the variety of systems involved.
For several years, the Supply Chain Engineering department has been addressing the conception and development of software solutions for integrating occurring data in holistic systems.
The term Shadowed Supply Chain describes the depiction of an (abstract) modeled version of the supply chain that enables the testing of planned measures and a preview of interactions when they are imported. The Shadowed Supply Chain supports the integration of stabilizing measures and contributes to a robust supply chain.
In the past, the use of so-called expert methods like simulation and optimization in businesses have been seen with skepticism. These methods were cumbersome to use and difficult to access for the user. Therefore they were used in studies but not in the day-to-day planning of companies. Due to the development of logistics assistance systems the Supply Chain Engineering department however was able to successfully implement these profitable methods in practice and for the daily application. The developed assistance systems are tightly linked to the company systems via flexible interfaces and provide user-friendly surfaces for data manipulation and evaluation for planners in the company. This makes it possible to use simulation analyses or mathematical optimization based on current data “with the click of a button” and therefore use it for daily planning.
