Analytical Planning Stability Research: No Reason for Nervousness!

Planning stability or its counterpart, planning nervousness, is a challenging issue for many companies as well as for scientists who try to analyze and explain this phenomenon. Research in this area mainly concentrates on the field of production and materials planning where current replanning activities contribute to nervousness. For a long period, this research only consisted of descriptive or simulation-based work. Since the middle 1990s, however, we also find analytical approaches which provide direct mathematical insights into the effects of the choice of different inventory control rules and their parameters on the size of planning stability. Only a handful of such contributions on nervousness yet have been published and can be evaluated here. This lack of research may be caused by major technical challenges connected with this type of analysis. The findings from these papers, though restricted to quite simple planning environments, provide deep and general insights which can be used for managerial decision making. These insights could be further extended and generalized if some more complex planning situations, which up to now are only treated in simulation studies, would be investigated with analytical methods. Against the background of potential findings, it would be highly desirable if ambitious researchers could be motivated to take on this job without nervousness and hesitation despite all cumbersome mathematical effort.