To make informed forecasting and replenishment decisions, many companies bring together operational elements of production and distribution with sales and marketing, executing Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) collaborative improvement processes. As cross-functional and consensus-based processes, S&OP activities create value by keeping supply and demand in balance. But most S&OP arrangements...

The class UP of ‘ultimate polynomial time’ problems over C is introduced; it contains the class P of polynomial time problems over C. The τ -Conjecture for polynomials implies that UP does not contain the class of non-deterministic polynomial time problems definable without constants over C. This latest statement implies that P 6 = NP over C. A notion of ‘ultimate complexity’ of a problem is su...