They distinguish horizontally along the flow of goods between procurement, production, distribution and sales. Procurement is concerned with providing the resources. Production covers aspects from location planning to shop floor control. Distribution bridges the gap between production and customers. Sales consider mainly demand forecasts. The vertical distinction of planning tasks into long-, mid-and short-term is determined by the importance and planning horizon.
Fleischmann et al. (2008) group long-term planning tasks into one module to illustrate the comprehensive character of strategic planning. It designs the overall configuration and requires long-term investments in the infrastructure. Mid-term master planning coordinates daily business and typically develops plans for 6–24 months. Finally, short-term planning specifies activities before the execution. The disaggregation of data and options follows the decreasing planning horizon down the hierarchy. The planning modules are coordinated with adjacent modules and account for interdependencies between product and information flow.
The strength of the SC planning of Fleischmann et al. (2008) lies in the decomposition of decisions and structuring planning problems. It aligns planning aspects according to the time-horizons and the value chain activities. However, it has been mainly designed for a business-to-business environment and does not explicitly integrate consumer behavior and store management, which is of major relevance in retail. The sales domain is reduced to product program planning and demand forecast and therefore mainly serves as data input for other planning areas.
The literature so far does not provide a hierarchical and sequential planning concept for the retail industry. Therefore, we structure advanced DSCP tasks, provide a framework for a consumer-driven SC and provide a state-of-the-art overview of DSSs. First of all, we will detail the requirements for grocery retailing. Thisbuilds thefoundationand definesthe requirementfor aretail specific operations framework, which follows afterwards.