DRP: A Novel Approach for Requirement Planning in Supply Chain Management

Managing the inventory of heterogeneous products among the different companies across the globe is a crucial task for any product based company. The objective of new system DRP is to control the inventory at the customer site (VMI) to the lowest permissible level defined as Minimum Inventory. This is achieved by creating a Supply Chain Model that contains a network of Demand Sites and Supply Sites along with the transit time and other parameters for each product consumed by the Customer. This model is used to determine availability (Stock, FABOUTS, VMI and GIT) at the Supply & Demand site and the Demand at the Demand Site; and use this information to generate replenishment plan and trigger shipments just in time (JIT) such that there is no stock out at the customer site nor there is inventory build up at the customer site. Minimum and Maximum inventory is decided by a complex business function and is an agreement between company and the Customer. The System also provides an interface to the user to define the Supply Chain Model and its various entities and also to validate the output and make necessary changes before triggering subsequent operations like Shipment generation.