Q: What can you do about requirements that cannot be realized just by setting parameters?

A: We recommend that the Advanced Planning and Scheduling System be implemented to the best of your ability with just the parameter settings. However there are also many needs that cannot be answered just by parameter settings. In situations like that you have to first examine whether your can cover all of your operations. If you can't then you have to look at program development. The reason we recommend that is because there is a big difference between parameter programming and program development. To those who say that with program development we can develop anything" we would say consider the following risks.

● In addition to the cost and time required for development (including payments for programmers) there will be a large number of bugs at the start of operations.
● The programmers must be retained for maintenance after operations begin. It is particularly difficult to keep excellent systems engineers and programmers within the company because of the high demand for them.

Even then additional programs will be developed as needed. There are two types of program development.

1.  External program development
2.  Plug-in development

The explanation follows.

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