A systemic approach to define and characterize Advanced Planning Systems (APS)

Advanced Planning Systems (APS) have become an important tool for manufacturing and production companies that require a specific system to optimize production, logistic, material and human resources, etc. with the goal of improving the economy of the companies and offer a good customer service. An APS must be integrated to the Enterprise's System (such as an ERP), but this task usually lacks of a specific methodology to be performed and is generally made ad-hoc. With the ultimate objective to provide an approach to facilitate this integration, this work presents a characterization of the APS from a systemic point of view, using standardized Software Engineering concepts. The idea is to provide a definition and characterization of Advanced Planning Systems, by establishing the main goals of this type of system, and considering Functional Requirements, Quality Attributes and a reference model for the architecture. The selected choices are established on the base of several international standards from the Software Engineering area, such as the SEBoK (System Engineering Body of Knowledge) and the SQuaRE (Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation) model, among others, and aim to serve as a base line for the general concept of APS.