Supply chain management and advanced planning - basics, overview and challenges

Literature on supply chain management (SCM) covers several disciplines and is growing rapidly. This paper firstly aims at extracting the essence of SCM and advanced planning in the form of two conceptual frameworks: The house of SCM and the supply chain planning matrix. As an illustration, contributions to this feature issue will then be assigned to the building blocks of the house of SCM or to the modules covering the supply chain planning matrix. Secondly, focusing on software for advanced planning, we outline its main shortcomings and present latest research results for their resolution. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.