ABSTRACT
Logistics people, processes, equipment, and systems are a large part of the order fulfillment process and of creating customer satisfaction. At the beginning of the process, sales and marketing present an updated forecast and data about the outstanding customer orders. It is important to synchronize the forecast with actual orders so that there is no double-counting or demand missed. Finite capacity planning analyzes at the load on each significant work center and checks if it exceeds capacity. If it does, the work is rescheduled to avoid overloads. This description oversimplifies the work of this function, but in essence this is what it does. Forrester defined this effect in the 1950s and a lot of useful work has been researched and published since then. Spares type demand is often planned using a special bill of material (BOM). These are called spares bills, unplanned use bills, indirect bills, and various other names.
