Conjoint utilization of structured and unstructured information for planning interleaving deliberation in supply chains

Abstract

Effective business planning requires seamless access and intelligent analysis of information in its totality to allow the business planner to gain enhanced critical business insights for decision support. Current business planning tools provide insights from structured business data (i.e. sales forecasts, customers and products data, inventory details) only and fail to take into account unstructured complementary information residing in contracts, reports, user's comments, emails etc. In this article, a planning support system is designed and developed that empower business planners to develop and revise business plans utilizing both structured data and unstructured information conjointly. This planning system activity model comprises of two steps. Firstly, a business planner develops a candidate plan using planning template. Secondly, the candidate plan is put forward to collaborating partners for its revision interleaving deliberation. Planning interleaving deliberation activity in the proposed framework enables collaborating planners to challenge both a decision and the thinking that underpins the decision in the candidate plan. The planning system is modeled using situation calculus and is validated through a prototype development.