Release Notes

SC Navigator 24.12.2

Date October 14, 2024

• Improvements

  • The solve time has been reduced. Depending on the size and specifics of the model, this improvement might be hardly noticeable, while in some cases this might have a significant impact.

• Bug Fixes

  • A change made in the previous version (In some cases with minimum production, the model could be incorrectly marked as infeasible or display the message “A problem occurred during the optimization.”) could in some extra cases, lead to an incorrect solution due to numerical issues.

SC Navigator 24.12.1

Date October 11, 2024

• New Features

  • A new attribute has been created on the Customer Product Data sheet: ‘Minimum Lead Time Adherence’. This attribute determines what percentage of demand for a given customer, location, product, period combination must be fulfilled within the lead time. When you want the model to take this into account, you have to Relax Lead Time on the Control Panel page.

• Improvements

  • The custom objectives of type “Risk” are no longer shown on the control panel page. There would never be data for those custom objectives, so keeping it there could lead to potential confusion.

  • The Risk Analysis page is now initialized after a Risk Analysis is loaded.

  • We received some feedback based on the changes implemented in SC Navigator 24.11.1, so we made some minor changes to the behavior of the “Filter by Node Type”:

    • If you (un)select one of the four standard elements (Customer, Supplier, Warehouse, Production), it will (un)select all the groups of the type. This will now also happen if you have elements that do not belong to a subgroup.

    • Elements that don’t belong to any group, can be shown by unchecking every subgroup, while keeping the related standard element checked.

    • Groups for which only part of the locations are shown, will now have a gray background in the checkbox and a tooltip to indicate that only some of the related locations are shown.

      The full behavior is described in Node Filters.

• Bug Fixes

  • After loading an Excel template (without saving it as a dataset), the widgets on page Data - Customer did not all update correctly when making demand adjustments. Now, the Selected Demand widget refreshes after each Adjust Demand iteration and the table Demand Adjustment updates correctly as well.

  • For Risk Analysis, Profit Decrease is now the same as Cost Increase in case there is no revenue. Previously in this case the Profit Decrease was opposite to the Cost Increase.

  • The attribute ‘Open As Group’ was not included in the template.

  • Curly bracket support for ‘Mode of Transport’ was not working correctly for Custom Cost attributes.

  • Curly bracket support for ‘To Location’ in Stepwise Transport Cost was not working correctly.

  • When not applying variable cost for a warehouse that is at the same location as a production facility, users could get an error message after optimization: “A problem occurred during the optimization. (…)”

  • Previously, when reading input from an Excel file, an empty cell in the first column of a sheet was not properly handled. SC Navigator would not give an error message, while it stopped reading the sheet. In this new version, it will give an error message, indicating that an empty cell was found.

  • On page Data, in the Data Dashboard widget, Suppliers and Supplier groups were not counted correctly.

  • The geocoding did not work correctly if you specified a Postal Code and Country, but not a country-code. In that case, the model was using a special postal-code setup, while that required a country code. This resulted in inaccurate results; in some cases the returned locations were even outside the requested country.

  • The file “_dataset_info.parquet”, created as part of a results dataset, still contained capitals and spaces in the header names. In newly generated results, these headers will now only use lower case and underscores in the names.

  • Some exported parquet files contained columns starting with “unit_of_” that were not expected. These columns will no longer be generated in exported results.

  • In some cases with minimum production, the model could be incorrectly marked as infeasible or display the message “A problem occurred during the optimization.”

SC Navigator 24.11.2

Date September 13, 2024

• Bug Fixes

  • When the arcs on your map have been customized at some point, opening the Control Panel page in version 24.11.1 could result in an incorrect error: “The file “modeloptions_settings.txt” cannot be opened: No such file or directory.”

SC Navigator 24.11.1

Date September 13, 2024

• Improvements

  • Upon completion of the optimization run, SC Navigator will now popup a system notification, indicating that the solver is ready. This is useful when solving the model takes a lot of time and your are doing something else in the mean time. You can turn this off on the Control Panel page. Please note that the first time, you have to select in your browser that you allow this page to send notifications.

  • On page Results, on the View Options side panel, the behavior of the “Filter by Node Type” has been adjusted. The new behavior is as follows:

    • SC Navigator shows those locations for which all groups, to which this element belongs, are checked. (In the past, it was primarily based on checking/unchecking one group, but it was not clear to the user which group that was.)

    • If you (un)select one of the four standard elements (Customer, Supplier, Warehouse, Production), it will (un)select all the groups of the type. This will not happen if you have elements that do not belong to a subgroup.

    • If you unselect a subgroup, it will not impact the related standard element. (If you do that, item 1 will turn them all off).

    • The table no longer shows an icon for groups that have multiple node types.

      We changed this behavior to better handle the situation where multiple node types are located in one place, as well as the situation where groups contain multiple node types.

  • For rate card input data, it is now possible to define negative values. This allows for defining a formula for your rate card cost with a negative component in it (e.g. ax - b). The resulting rate card lane unit cost do need to be non-negative. The data validation has been updated accordingly: instead of checking the input data itself, the rate card lane unit cost is calculated and only when that is negative, it will result in an error.

  • We removed some unnecessary blank columns from the Excel Template. Furthermore, on sheets with an ‘Attribute’ column, the ‘Description of the attribute’ column is now aligned with the ‘Attribute’ column.

  • During data validation, when an incorrect date format is used, the following error message will now be displayed: “The attributes ‘Start Date’ and ‘End Date’ need to be valid dates in a date format. That is not the case for date with name …”.

  • The documentation on the Infeasibility Analysis has been improved. You can now read in more detail what you can do to find the cause of an infeasibility.

  • The documentation on the End To End Results has been improved, such that it is more clear what the data in the table represents.

• Bug Fixes

  • On page Results - Production, in the top-right corner, the Bill of Material filter is now applied to the production volume chart. This allows for a more granular view of production data based on specific Bill of Materials produced in a production resource.

  • Previously, internal flows could occur at locations with two or more warehouses, even if those warehouses lacked inventory capabilities and the location did not have production facilities. This is no longer possible, as internal flows are now restricted under these conditions.

SC Navigator 24.10.1

Date August 20, 2024

• New Features

  • A new attribute has been added to the Supplier, Supplier Product, Warehouse, Warehouse Product and Production sheets: Open As Group. This attribute allows you, in multi-period models, to indicate that the entity needs to be open or closed for the complete period. There are two benefits compared to how it could be done previously: It it easier to specify and it leads to faster performance.

• Improvements

  • The documentation has been restructured for easier navigation.

  • Data Validation will raise an error when the input data includes demand for a product that has no available supply, production, or opening inventory.

  • For some of the rate card data validations, the maximum number of detailed data validation messages has been set to 10000 in order to limit time spent on data validation.

  • In the Node Type filters, all customer groups are now by default colored with color “Customer Default”. The color of the groups can still be changed on the ‘Customize Nodes’ dialog page that you can open from the Map widget action ‘Customize Nodes’.

• Bug Fixes

  • On page Results - End to End, the direct transport lanes (from supplier to customer) were not visible on the map.

  • When running the infeasibility analysis for a model with multi-step suppliers that do not have capacities specified, the warning message “A problem occurred during the optimization” could appear.

  • When running the infeasibility analysis for a model with customers that have attribute Maximum # of Source Locations set, the message “No solution found - The model is still infeasible” could appear. Now, this constraint is also handled properly in the Infeasibility Analysis.

  • For curly production group data, previously the app raised a data validation warning if any step in the individual productions had missing availability data. However, it should only need the availability data for the first step.

  • In some rare situations, a dataset saved with the previous version of SC Navigator, could no longer be loaded. This has been fixed in this new version of SC Navigator, but it requires you to save the dataset again, from the template.

  • With this release a new version of Inventory Planning is released as well. In the Inventory Planning app, when exporting a scenario, the Work in Progress data is now saved to the data lake as well.

SC Navigator 24.9.1

Date July 30, 2024

• New Features

  • If the model has Data Separation and the user is connected to multiple business units/groups, SC Navigator will now show a new item (Business Unit) on the status bar. Users can switch between their different groups using this item.

• Improvements

  • We have improved the loading of results, for results saved in this version.

  • The results of the selected CoG Trade-Off Analysis runs can now be exported.

  • In “System Configuration”, we have removed the “Conversion to Data Lake” page as it is no longer needed. Additionally, the ability to change the data source by clicking on the status bar “Data Source” item has been disabled.

  • A new option has been added to the Whiteboard Edit Node Info dialog, allowing users to disable the creation of groups for nodes that contain a single Supplier, Production, Warehouse, or Customer.

  • The exported parquet files have new attributes names going forward, to allow for better support by data platforms like BigQuery and Databricks. The new attributes are all lower case letters (a-z) and underscores, so no more spaces and parentheses. In the generated input definition file “Parquet File Definition SC Navigator.xlsx” (see Download Parquet File Structure) and the generated output definition file “parquet-results-definition.xlsx”, both the old and the new attribute names are present. SC Navigator input parquet files support both names right now, while output files will only use the new names.

• Bug Fixes

  • When running Trade-Off Analysis or CoG Trade-Off Analysis simultaneously with a Location Risk Analysis, the error message: “awf.data.aimms.session: There already exists a file or directory named…” will no longer appear.

SC Navigator 24.8.1

Date July 19, 2024

• Improvements

  • The option ‘Results visible for everyone’ is now available when saving CoG Trade-Off results.

  • On page Data - Production, 2 new tables were added with input attributes that were already in the template, but not yet visible in the app: Bill of Material Data and Production Routing Data.

  • On page Data - Other, 3 new tables were added with input attributes that were already in the template, but not yet visible in the app: Bill of Material Groups, Mode of Transport Groups, and Use Description.

  • On the Whiteboard, transport lanes that are not permitted, can no longer be drawn. E.g. lanes from warehouses to suppliers.

• Bug Fixes

  • In version 24.7.1, attribute Inter Resource Number of Trips was added to sheet “Inter Resource Transport”, while it should have been added to sheet “Transport Cost”. It is now in that sheet, and the sheet “Inter Resource Transport” is not longer in the results file.

SC Navigator 24.7.4

Date July 12, 2024

• Bug Fixes

  • In some specific cases, Zone Rate Card data was not processed correctly, resulting in fatal errors during the Data Validation. When you didn’t get fatal errors, your Zone Rate Card data was already processed correctly.

  • On pages Data - Warehouse and Data - Supplier, the filter now works well for both Warehouse and Supplier groups.

  • Product Needed volume in case of multi-level BOMs was not taken into consideration correctly when calculating virtual maximum capacities. (The model allows unlimited capacity however in the actual model a maximum value is required.) This could have generated an error message: “A problem occurred during the optimization. Please contact user support (support@aimms.com) to solve the problem before using the results of the optimization.”

  • SC Navigator did not allow for flows between a production facility and warehouses at the same location, and this could lead to infeasible models.

  • In some cases, the model could return an infeasible solution, without notifying the user of this. That resulted in negative values for some results that should be positive. We have made some changes that should prevent this kind of behavior.

  • When a dataset has a very large number of customers, the customer nodes should not be visible on the map by default. However, for customer groups, the nodes were shown.

  • On page Results, the Reference Map did not show locations that are part of a compared case but not part of the active case.

  • In some rare cases, the System Cost could not be calculated correctly. This could happen when the model contains other System Cost, next to System Cost related to Supply/Production/Warehouse/Transport.

SC Navigator 24.7.3

Date July 5, 2024

• Bug Fixes

  • On pages Trade-Off Analysis and Center of Gravity - CoG Trade-Off, dots in the charts now display the right colors that match the state of the run.

  • On pages Results - Transport, and Results - Full Solution Export, the values for ‘Number of Trips’ are now rounded up.

  • Product Group Minimum Capacities and Base Case Volumes were not taken into consideration correctly when calculating virtual maximum capacities. (The model allows unlimited capacity however in the actual model a maximum value is required.) This could have generated an error message: “A problem occurred during the optimization. Please contact user support (support@aimms.com) to solve the problem before using the results of the optimization.”

  • On page Center of Gravity - Details, the Fulfilled Demand column is now correctly displayed when solving for Number of CoGs or Max Drive Time. This column got hidden unintentionally.

SC Navigator 24.7.2

Date June 27, 2024

• Improvements

  • On pages Data - Production and Results - Production, a BOM filter is added.

• Bug Fixes

  • It was possible that certain datasets were not visible in the dataset overview, while they were there before. They will now be visible again.

  • On page Results, at the View Options side panel, it was not possible to unselect ‘Supplier’. Also, the visualization of customer groups was not correct, all customer nodes were colored the same.

  • After selecting a big Excel template file to upload on the Load Data dialog page, there was no visual indication that the file was being uploaded. This could result in confusion about whether the file was being processed or not. Now, after selecting the file, a transparent veil and a message are displayed, indicating that the file is being uploaded.

SC Navigator 24.7.1

Date June 24, 2024

• New Features

  • The ‘CoG’ and the ‘CoG Trade-Off’ functionalities have been extended with the ability to do a Constrained CoG. The Constrained CoG allows you to perform CoG calculations, but it can include capacity constraints on the number of CoGs, the new CoG throughput, the existing Warehouses, and the existing Suppliers. Please know that a constrained CoG model is a simplified model to determine potential warehouse locations, and you are advised to run the generated CoG solution through the full SC Navigator model. More information on Constrained CoG can be found in the documentation.

  • From now on, Scenario Batch runs can be run in parallel in the background, allowing the user to use other features of the software while waiting for the results of the Batch Run. The number of concurrent solver sessions in your license will determine how many solves can be run in parallel. Please contact your account manager if you would like to increase the number of concurrent solver sessions.

• Improvements

  • On page Data - Manage Data, a new column (# Results) has been added to the tables Input Datasets and Scenarios, so that you can see the number of Results datasets that are build on top of this dataset/scenario.

  • On page Data - Manage Data, the Results table did not show Results Dataset that somebody else created, but did not share. They are now all shown, so that they can be deleted if needed.

  • On page Results - Transport, the ‘Number of Trips’ column is added to the ‘Primary Transportation’, ‘Secondary Transportation’, ‘Direct Transportation’, and ‘InterResource Transportation’ tables. The number of trips is calculated based on the volume and the average load size.

  • On page Control Panel, in the Model Control table, the ‘Optimality Gap for Optimization’ value is now shown with all digits in the tooltip.

• Bug Fixes

  • On pages Results - ‘Cost to Serve’ and ‘End To End’, the ‘Customer Revenue’ was the average revenue (by period) instead of the actual revenue.

  • An “-” in the name of a custom objective could lead to a situation where the custom objective was not calculated at all.

  • The Product Filter on production-related pages did not include all the production-related products. This issue also had an effect on the maps showing Production locations. Production locations with all products unselected were still shown on the map, and the volume shown on the tooltip of the Production location was not correct.

  • It is now possible to download the template from the Whiteboard without location data (a warning will be given instead of a fatal error). This makes it possible to make use of Excel while providing the location data.

  • On page Results - Transport, the Volume by Mode of Transport chart showed all transport modes instead of only the available ones.

  • During the development of CoG Trade-Off some bugs appeared in the normal Trade-Off Analysis which are now fixed.

SC Navigator 24.6.2

Date June 13, 2024

• Bug Fixes

  • In the previous release, SC Navigator 24.6.1, you could run into an incorrect infeasibility caused by rate bands with no ‘Distance Lower’ and ‘Distance Upper’ data. These rate bands were not possible to be selected for any lanes. Therefore the app concluded that the model was infeasible, while actually it should be possible to select these rate bands.

  • Also in the previous release, the border of the customer nodes in the map was not as clear as before.

  • On page Results - KPI overview, clicking on the top middle chart could result in an error.

SC Navigator 24.6.1

Date June 10, 2024

• New Features

  • The rate card functionality has been extended with two new attributes: Rate Card From and Rate Card To. This allows the user to model zone rate cards that have different prices depending on the origin (e.g. country/state) and destination (country/state) combination. For more details please read about Rate Card Related Attributes in the documentation.

• Improvements

  • On the Load Data dialog page, we’ve improved the Upload Excel File experience. After selecting your Excel file, this file will directly be uploaded and you no longer have to explicitly click on the Upload widget again. This will prevent users from accidentally clicking the Load (dataset) button when trying to upload an Excel file.

  • We have added two new sections to the SC Navigator documentation: Best Practices and Data Integration. The Best Practices section contains articles on using SC Navigator to address various supply chain challenges. The Data Integration section provides guidance on setting up data integration between SC Navigator and external data sources. We will continue to add more articles to these sections in the future.

  • On pages Results - Cost to Serve and End to End, the System Cost is now split into four different categories: Supply System Cost, Production System Cost, Warehouse System Cost, and Transport System Cost.

  • We have improved how some data was stored in the Azure Data Lake. As a result, the first time you open the application will take a little bit longer.

  • In the Node Type filters, you can now filter for Customer and Supplier groups in addition to Production or Warehouse groups. This also means that if your Customer and Supplier nodes are part of a group, they will now use the new group coloring.

  • When “Move to closest cities” is enabled in the CoG settings, the name of the CoG includes the name of the city where the application places the CoG. Now, also the country where the city is located will be included, and if that city is in the United States, the name of the CoG will also include the state.

• Bug Fixes

  • In some rare situations, AIMMS SC Navigator could throw you out of the application (bringing you back to the login page) when loading a dataset, for no reason at all. Now you can continue to use the app after the dataset is loaded.

  • On the Edit Supplier Node Info dialog that can be accessed from within the Whiteboard page, the Supported Products selection was empty by default in case of a model without any Raw Material. Now, by default the Finished Product Group will be selected in this case.

  • After running the Infeasibility Analyzer, the KPI Summary dialog can show a very high or low objective value. This is caused by the violation penalty that the Infeasibility Analyzer uses to solve the model. However, this information was not visible on the KPI Summary dialog. An additional row is now added to the top left table there, containing the violation penalty. The cost values are now consistent with the objective value, also when an infeasibility analysis is run.

  • In some rare occasions, SC Navigator could generate a message like this “String length XYZ exceeds maximum of 1024 in Parquet table file …” (where XYZ was greater than 1024) and prevented you from reading the data. This message will not be shown anymore and you can read the data without any issues.

SC Navigator 24.5.1

Date May 21, 2024

• New Features

  • Ratio constraints have been added for Suppliers, Productions, Warehouses, and Transport Lanes, allowing the SC Navigator optimization model to capture business rules better. You can use this feature via the new sheets in the template: Supplier Ratio, Production Routing Ratio, Warehouse Ratio, and Transport Ratio. You can read more about Ratio Constraint Attributes in the SC Navigator documentation.

  • A new attribute ‘Maximum Road Distance To Retrieve’ can now be specified for any transport mode on the ‘Mode of Transport’ sheet in the template. As a result, when retrieving road distance data, if a lane is using a mode of transport for which Maximum Road Distance To Retrieve has been specified and the straight line distance for that lane is greater than the Maximum Road Distance To Retrieve, then the distance is not retrieved and the straight line distance will be used for that lane.

  • Next to the Trade-Off Analysis that we introduced earlier this year, you can now also do a Center of Gravity Trade-Off Analysis. You can do this on the new Center of Gravity sub page ‘CoG Trade-Off’. You can set up and run multiple Center of Gravity runs here. During the runs the user can continue the work at other parts of SC Navigator and can return to check the results when the runs are ready. For more information, please read CoG Trade-Off in the documentation.

• Improvements

  • A new data validation warning has been introduced to indicate whether the roundtrip attribute is used for lanes other than inter-resource lanes.

  • The behavior of Download Solution on the Save Results Data dialog has changed. Previously, it would only export the current data to an Excel file. However, in the new version you can export multiple results datasets to a single Excel file. You can read in the documentation how to use Download Solution for downloading multiple results datasets.

  • You can now also filter data in tables on dialog pages. For instance, this allows you to use filtering when trying to select an input or results dataset.

  • The performance of the whiteboard when working with a large number of locations has been improved.

• Bug Fixes

  • On page Trade-off Analysis, the selected secondary y-axis was not saved into the Trade-Off Analysis Results Datasets, so when the saved data was loaded, the secondary y-axis was not initialized properly.

  • On page Center of Gravity, for the Cost Breakdown widget, the bar colors are now consistent with the legend colors.

  • The validation logic for country codes (on the Location sheet) now checks both the “Country” and “Country Code” columns to ensure data integrity. Previously, it only checked the ‘Country’ column.

  • If one or more of the following attributes on the Location sheet contained only empty spaces: “Street”, “City”, “Postal Code”, “State”, or “Country”, the generated geo coordinates could not be saved to the database.

  • On page Results - End To End, the table contained a column called ‘Warehouse’. This column is now correctly named ‘Production’.

  • The playback action of the period slider could sometimes skip periods.

  • The element ‘cts_e2e_dummy’ was included in the “End to End Report”. This is an internally generated element that should not have been included in that report.

  • Uploading an Excel template with extensive data in the Supplier Product sheet could be extremely slow.

  • We have adjusted an internal solver setting to improve the performance. However, in the unlikely situation that this change negatively impacts the performance, please contact us for assistance.

  • Previously, exporting CoGs to the SC Navigator dataset would assign excessive transportation cost data. Now, when exporting CoGs, they will inherit the relevant transportation cost data from their associated location group.

SC Navigator 24.4.3

Date April 15, 2024

• Improvements

  • On page Control Panel, the elements in the “Min/Max Constraints” table has been ordered logically, min before max, and to: suppliers, production, warehouses and locations.

  • You can now see the Total Physical Cost and/or Total Physical Revenue in the Trade-Off Analysis, even when this is not included in the objective.

  • The attribute “Use Description Resource” was renamed to “Use Description Warehouse/Production”.

  • On page Whiteboard, the center and zoom level will now be included when saving a whiteboard dataset. Upon loading a whiteboard dataset, the whiteboard will retain its previously saved view, eliminating the need to manually adjust the center and zoom each time.

• Bug Fixes

  • On page Results - View options side panel, in the Filter by Node Type widget, curly bracket group names are no longer shown in the list. This change prevents the confusion caused by the duplication of group names with and without curly brackets.

  • On page Center of Gravity, the Transport Filter selection is now kept when refreshing the page.

  • On the Customize Nodes dialog and Customize Arcs dialog, the Color Names in the Color Reference List have been updated and made consistent with the corresponding colors.

  • On pages Results - Supplier / Production / Warehouse curly bracket groups are no longer appearing in the charts.

  • In the template on sheet “Products”, the description of the link to e-learning material is corrected.

  • The model previously allowed invalid flow scenarios where materials were routed through production facilities acting as intermediary warehouses, which in some cases resulted in a cheaper transportation cost. The model has been updated to prevent this unrealistic flow.

  • After exporting a scenario in Inventory Planning to Azure Data Lake Storage, an error could occur. The data was exported, but the scenario could not be marked as ‘adopted’.

  • Previously, when a product could be manufactured at multiple production resources, the End To End page would incorrectly display the total production volume duplicated for each production. This resulted in an inflated total volume being shown. The End To End page now accurately displays the shared volume allocation for each production resource involved in manufacturing the product.

  • In System Configuration 24.4.2 after changing the data source, the secondary page action ‘Set Data Lake (or Database) as Data Source’ remained inactive with the text ‘Data Lake (Database) already set as Data Source’, while that was not always the case.

  • In the System Configuration app, the status bar displays what data source is used. Previously, the app always displayed ‘Database’ as data source at startup of the app. Now the data source is properly initialized.

SC Navigator 24.4.2

Date April 4, 2024

• Improvements

  • The tooltip of the UOM item on the the status bar, now shows all Unit of Measurement information. So, it shows the UOM for currency and distances as well.

  • In Center of Gravity, when adding CoGs to the set of Warehouses, you had to specify both a location and a warehouse group to which the CoGs would be added. From now on, only Location Groups are mandatory. Warehouse Groups are optional.

  • On the Results sub pages, when comparing multiple results datasets, the layout of the top right chart is now consistent for the several pages with regard to the order of showing the period and results datasets.

  • This new version gives a warning when the “import” file system (where you can upload your own datasets, see Details for details) is not structured correctly.

  • The Transportation Load Size data validation functionality is updated. There used to be two validations for these issues, a warning and an error. From now on there will be only an error message to indicate when Average Load Size data is missing.

• Bug Fixes

  • If you asked the model to calculate the distance/duration between two very close locations, it could mark them as “unable to calculate”, while it should mark them as 0 distance instead.

  • After loading an SC Navigator results dataset and running Center of Gravity afterwards, sometimes the generated CoG locations did not display on the map.

  • The name of the sheet “Bill Of Material Groups” generated by the whiteboard was misspelled and therefore the sheet was not picked up correctly by the model.

  • A dataset with multiple periods could be infeasible after adding CoG results to the model.

  • The model would allow you to save scenarios that were longer than 64 characters, but would not read them in correctly. Now, the length of a scenario can be up to 160 characters. You will not be able to save scenarios with a name longer than that.

  • Customers without demand on the Customer Product Data sheet will no longer cause a data validation error.

  • After loading a results dataset, the model could give an error with respect to reading from database tables. This only happened if your system has been converted to Azure Data Lake Storage, and you loaded a results dataset that was created before your system was converted.

  • Inventory Planning gave an error when your data was transferred to Data Lake Storage. With this release a new version of Inventory Planning is released as well. This version can read/write data from/to Parquet files in Azure Data Lake Storage, just like SC Navigator can.

SC Navigator 24.4.1

Date March 19, 2024

• New Features

  • The System Configuration app has a new page “Case Management”. This allows you to move Results Datasets (that are not shared) from one user to another. This is needed, when one user leaves their role and another user is taking over this role and needs access to the saved results.

• Improvements

  • Data validation is added for the Whiteboard feature. Now, before the template is downloaded, the application will automatically validate the data and if any issues are found, it will show these in dialog.

  • Another new data validation was added to the model. It will now give an error when there is a location without any supplier, warehouse, production, or customer on it, but there is a lane defined for it.

  • The tooltip of the “Help” button in the bottom right corner (on the status bar) now indicates that it guides you to both the documentation and the release notes.

  • On the Save Results Data dialog for saving Trade-Off Analysis Results, the “Results visible to everyone” switch is added, such that you can now also share Trade-Off Analysis results with other users.

  • We improved the Trade-off Analysis code from a technical point of view, such that we can modify it more easily in the future.

  • The performance of models with a high number of locations has been improved.

• Bug Fixes

  • In rare instances, after running an optimization, it is possible to receive the warning message “A problem occurred during the optimization (…)”. This message occurs when the app concludes that for that specific situation, it used too strict constraints during the optimization. We have adapted the model such that the constraints are no longer too strict in this case.

  • The “Production Routing” Minimum and Maximum Capacity were incorrectly scaled when loaded from a dataset created in version 24.2.1 up to 24.3.3. Those datasets will continue to have this problem, however after this fix newly created datasets will not have this problem. When you use “Production Routing” Minimum and/or Maximum Capacities, we advise you to reload your data from your Excel template and save it as a new dataset with this new version of SC Navigator.

  • After the recent update of the map colors, some custom node and arc color settings were prompting a warning message stating that a color “is not an element of the checked set Map_ColorPalette”. Custom map color settings will no longer cause this warning.

  • After a dataset or results dataset was deleted, the name was not removed from all lists, so it could still be visible.

  • On page Center of Gravity, in rare cases, the algorithm behind the Solve Max Drive Time button could result in an Error: “The model was not solved, most likely due to an infeasibility”. This could happen when some locations were distant from real cities, such that the algorithm was not able to generate a viable CoG location within the specified Maximum Drive Time. These distant location are now considered themselves as possible CoG locations, such that the model that is part of the algorithm, is no longer infeasible.

  • On page Center of Gravity - CoG Settings, in widget General Settings, the transportation speed is now used correctly when calculating the drive times in Center of Gravity.

  • On page Center of Gravity, in the Demand/Supply Distribution map, the Center of Gravity locations were not visible when loading a CoG results dataset, although the location latitude and longitude data were visible on the CoG Run Details page.

  • When downloading the model output, the ‘Force Close’ attribute would not be exported to the Supplier sheet.

  • Transport lanes were not appearing on the reference map when comparing results datasets that contained different products.

  • Opening and Closing Costs were not applied in single-period models. This behavior has been adjusted such that these costs will always be applied when Initial Status Closed is set to 1.

  • It was possible that Whiteboard Results would disappear from the list where they can be loaded, this version fixes that problem for the future. However, this does not fix Whiteboard Results that have already disappeared. If that happened to you, please contact us so we can fix this manually for you.

SC Navigator 24.3.3

Date March 4, 2024

• Bug Fixes

  • After conversion to Azure Data Lake Storage, the loading of the scenario overview could be slow, depending on the number of scenarios.

SC Navigator 24.3.2

Date February 29, 2024

• Improvements

  • We have updated the average distance calculation in Center of Gravity from an arithmetic mean to a weighted average. This new calculation takes into account the relative volume/importance of each location, giving a more accurate representation of the proximity of each CoG to its locations.

  • We have made some internal changes to the model that reduced the memory footprint of the application.

  • On page Whiteboard, the Transport Product Data table now also includes an ‘Average Load Size’ column. This data will be included in the template that you can export from the Whiteboard.

• Bug Fixes

  • A fatal error is now given if an Excel sheet is missing a mandatory column. The improved message clarifies on which sheet the error occurred.

  • The CoG locations were no longer shown on the map in SC Navigator 24.3.1; additionally, the tabulated latitude and longitude of the CoG locations was not visible.

  • In situations with constraints on both “Min # Warehouses” and “Minimum Capacity”, the model would open warehouses that did not satisfy the minimum capacity requirement. Warehouses will now only open if the “Minimum Capacity” constraint is satisfied.

  • The “Minimum Capacity” and “Maximum Capacity” attributes on the “Production Routing” sheet, added in version 24.2.1, were not in the generated template. However, they were used if you added them manually to your Excel file.

  • When using transportation lanes that have ‘Retrieve Distance’ set, in combination with locations that were added from Center of Gravity, the model would generate an error about missing distance data. Furthermore, it was not possible to retrieve the actual distance as those lanes were not shown on the Distance page. Now, the model will bring up the Error dialog and it will give you the option to navigate to the Distance page where you can retrieve the distance for these lanes.

  • Capacities defined for {Period} groups were not incorporated in the model, if there were also capacities defined for individual elements in that group.

  • The attributes ‘Minimum Inventory Cover’ and ‘Maximum Inventory Cover’ were not included in the Excel template.

SC Navigator 24.3.1

Date February 26, 2024

• New Features

  • The Whiteboard feature has been added: a powerful tool designed to streamline supply chain modeling. This innovative feature allows you to create a diagram of your supply chain network and translate it into an Excel template. The Whiteboard enhances the speed and accuracy of supply chain modeling, while also serving as an introduction to the SC Navigator approach of capturing the behavior and configuration of real-world supply chains in a spreadsheet. More information can be found in the Whiteboard documentation

• Improvements

  • The Inventory Cover functionality has been improved by introducing “Maximum Inventory Cover”. The attribute “Inventory Cover” has been renamed to “Minimum Inventory Cover”. With these attributes you can set the minimum / maximum number of next periods’ outflow covered in inventory.

  • On page Results - Transportation, the Transport Results table is added, showing all transport lanes including their capacities.

  • The node colors on the main map have been updated to improve visibility and to better distinguish between different nodes and resource groups. The old colors are still available via the widget action Customize Nodes on the main map.

• Bug Fixes

  • The Enforce Base Case Constraints option was not handled correctly when applying this via the scenario functionality. As a side effect, checking or unchecking that option will be faster.

  • The Trade-Off Analysis did not work correctly. The model would sometimes report the solution incorrectly as infeasible.

  • The changes made in version 24.2.1 with respect to group count constraints could result in very slow performance in instances with a high number of suppliers, productions and/or warehouses. This new version resolves those slowdowns.

  • The “Risk” attribute for custom objectives was not populated correctly when generating templates. Values were written to the column of attribute “Refundable with Limit”.

  • SC Navigator would report models with inventory and {warehouse group} capacity constraint incorrectly as infeasible. This was due to a constraint being enforced for group values, but for one variable (outflow) the flow was calculated but for the other variable (inventory) it was not.

  • The template was not generated correctly when custom objectives had a “-” in their name.

  • When a custom objective was renamed, its previous name was still taken into account.

  • When capacities were only defined at the product level, the tooltips of the charts on the result pages did not show them.

  • On page Trade-Off Analysis, the Run button could be pressed multiple times, triggering more runs than needed.

  • On page Center of Gravity, if the option Move to Closest City was selected, the tooltip and the result tables used different names for locations.

  • When there was a Trade-Off Analysis run in progress and a new Trade-Off Analysis run started with a newly loaded dataset, the previously started runs and the new runs were conflicted.

  • The Data Validation was numerically more strict than the network constraints.

  • On the Circular Flow page and the Load Optimization Results dialog, some internal names were visible. These are now properly translated to understandable names.

  • Forced Flow data validation with active inventory was not working correctly with groups.

SC Navigator 24.2.1

Date February 15, 2024

• New Features

  • The name of the uploaded Excel file will now be stored together with the dataset. It is shown in dataset overviews. This allows you to see what the source of the data is.

  • The model has been extended with two attributes “Minimum Capacity” and “Maximum Capacity” on the “Production Routing” sheet. That allows you to specify the capacity for a Bill of Material. (This value is in the same capacity unit as the data on sheet “Production”.)

  • A new sheet has been added: Bill of Material Groups. This allows you to create groups of Bill of Materials, in the same way that you create Product and Supplier groups. You can use {BOM} groups for the above-mentioned Minimum Capacity and Maximum Capacity. These capacities are also shown in the Results - Production page, as well as in the Excel and Database/Parquet results.

  • The Minimum and Maximum # of Open Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses attributes have been added to the Supplier, Production, and Warehouse sheets in the template. These allow count constraints to be added for curly bracket location, supplier, production and warehouse groups. More information on count constraints can be found in the documentation: Count and Ratio Constraints.

• Improvements

  • On page Results - Warehouse, when comparing scenarios, the “Throughput, Inventory” chart groups results by dataset.

  • After feedback from various users, we have adjusted the behavior of the model when using a Bill of Material that is specified over multiple production facilities in the “Production Routing” sheet. In previous versions, such a bill of material was required to use all facilities. The current model can pick one or more, depending on how much production capacity is needed. If desired, the old behavior can be achieved, by creating multiple Bill of Materials together with intermediate products.

  • On page Results - KPI Overview, and on the KPI Summary page, costs for Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses have been split into three buckets - Fixed Cost, Variable Cost, and Open/Close Cost.

  • On the KPI Summary page, the Service Widget now also contains the Cost Per UOM and the (number of) Open Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses.

  • The capacity on the server that is used to do all the optimization requests is shared by all users that use the same cloud. Previously, all optimization requests from all users were handled with the same priority. This means that a normal optimization request that was started by one user, had the same priority as Trade-Off Analysis or Risk Analysis requests that were started by another user. So, if you started a normal request after someone else started an Analysis request, it could take a long time before your request would be processed. Now, normal optimization runs have priority over runs from Trade-Off Analysis or Risk Analysis.

  • On page Center of Gravity, the transportation speed can be changed now. The default value is the average speed of all transportation types in the dataset.

  • In the dialog Add CoGs to the set of Warehouses, the values for Warehouse Group for CoGs and Location Group for CoGs are now initialized with the CoG Location Group/CoG Warehouse Group value provided in the template.

  • We have removed the “Solution found” dialog message at the end of a Solve Max Drive Time run, to prevent an unnecessary click.

  • By default, Suppliers are no longer included in the CoG calculations as many users ran into the warning Warning infinite capacity treated as zero. If you want to include suppliers, please select them again on page CoG Settings.

  • You can now edit the Center of Gravity Wiggle Factor parameter. The initial value is set to the average of the Transportation Wiggle factor in input data.

  • The tooltip for the CoG Weight Factor now includes a brief explanation of what this parameter controls.

  • When exporting CoG locations, the CoG Primary/Secondary Transport Cost values will be used to populate the ‘Cost Per Distance’ for primary or secondary lanes connecting the exported CoG locations. This ensures consistency between the parameters used in the Center of Gravity analysis and the exported data to be used in subsequent network optimization workflows.

  • SC Navigator could report models with inventory and {warehouse group} capacity constraints incorrectly as infeasible.

• Bug Fixes

  • In some cases, saving the results datasets could be much slower in SC Navigator version 24.1.1, compared to the previous version.

  • The Weighted Average Lead Time on the KPI Summary dialog was using the Maximum lead time, instead of the actual lead time.

  • On page Results, the coloring in the Reference Result map was not correct. It used the same coloring as the Active Result map, while it should color based on the data of the Reference Result dataset.

  • The calculation of Rate Card cost was not correct when lanes were defined with curly brackets. In that case, some costs were duplicated.

  • The data validation executed after Add CoGs to the set of Warehouses could give incorrect data validation errors and warnings.

  • The Trade-Off Analysis did not work correctly when having more than 10 runs and some of the runs would be marked as infeasible incorrectly.

  • The model could incorrectly generate this warning when loading a dataset: There exists a warehouse that has ‘Inventory Cover’, but no ‘Available (Inventory)’ for next period.

SC Navigator 24.1.1

Date January 16, 2024

• New Features

  • Risk Analysis simulates closing each location, one at a time, and assesses the corresponding impact. This will help you in finding the vulnerabilities of your supply chain. More information about the Risk Analysis can be found in the documentation: Risk Analysis.

  • With Trade-Off Analysis you can do multiple solves, each with a different setup, and find the best trade-off between your KPIs. More information about the Trade-Off Analysis can be found in the documentation: Trade-Off Analysis.

• Improvements

  • Previously, some pages displayed raw coding names instead of proper text. These have now been replaced with appropriate texts across all pages.

  • The pages “Geocodes” and “Distance” are now also available when the data is loaded from a dataset. In that case, the data on these pages is read-only.

  • The icons for the primary page actions on page “Geocodes” and “Distance”, have been replaced by icons that match the action, instead of the generic AIMMS logo.

  • Links to the latest e-learning material have been added to the template.

  • Solving time for datasets with Single Sourcing data is decreased in case of both active and relaxed optimization options.

  • The SC Navigator version numbering has changed. From now on, the first number will refer to the year in which the version was released. The second number still increases with every feature release. The third number increases for bug fix releases.

• Bug Fixes

  • The data validation warning that appeared when a minimum number of Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses/Locations was provided without a maximum, is removed.

  • When a results scenario was saved right after a Full Solution Export, the scenario did not appear in the list of results scenarios.

SC Navigator 4.05.04

Date December 19, 2023

• Improvements

  • On page Results - Customer, in the bottom right map, when a customer node is clicked, the drive time interval bar that corresponds to that customer’s drive time will become highlighted in the drive time distribution chart on the left.

  • A new source of System Cost has been introduced for multi-period models with inventory. The source is periods in which there is inventory, but no outflow. The Cost To Serve page also contains a new table with the source of this cost. This source and the table are explained in section System Cost Breakdown Table of the documentation.

  • In earlier releases it was possible to define minimum capacity or base case volume for lanes from a location to the same location. Now, this type of input data will result in a data validation error.

• Bug Fixes

  • The creation date of results datasets were truncated too much, in the long run leading to the complete removal of the date, when using Azure Data Lake Storage.

  • The application name of each results dataset was Network Design instead of SC Navigator, when using Azure Data Lake Storage.

  • On page Results - KPI Overview, in table Total Revenue and Total Cost the profit values were not correct in specific cases.

SC Navigator 4.05.03

Date December 12, 2023

• Improvements

  • For inventory-enabled datasets, the Results - Warehouse page and KPI Overview page now display separate Inbound and Outbound volumes, since these values may differ for warehouses that hold inventory.

  • If the longitude and latitude of a location was changed, SC Navigator would still use the previous retrieved distances and durations for lanes that were marked with Retrieve Distance. This new version stores the longitude and latitude of the origin and destination, so that this can be used going forward to determine if the previous retrieved distances are correct. (Only when using Azure Data Lake storage.) If the longitude and latitude is not stored (all distances retrieved before this version), the model will look at the date for which the longitude and latitude and distances were retrieved, and if the longitude and latitude of a location was retrieved after the day for which the distance was retrieved, SC Navigator will ask you to retrieve the distances again.

  • In previous releases extra lanes (from the production location to the same production location) were needed to make it possible to use multiple consecutive steps of BOM production. From now on these extra lanes are not needed. Multiple consecutive steps of BOM production is possible without any further setup.

• Bug Fixes

  • On page Results on the View Options side panel and on page Center of Gravity on the Node Filter side panel, the icons for node types had disappeared.

  • The Step in Use attribute for Warehouse Product could get empty when solution files were exported.

  • Earlier the Full Solution Export didn’t contain the Production BOM sheet data. Now this is included as well.

  • On page Results - Transport in table Secondary Transport, unnecessary rows appeared and made the content too large to fit in the table. The unnecessary rows no longer show up now.

SC Navigator 4.05.02

Date December 4, 2023

• Improvements

  • The data validation for disproportionately large maximum capacity data has been improved. The threshold that may trigger this warning is increased.

• Bug Fixes

  • In the rare situation that the model decided that a warehouse location was open for inventory, but the inventory level was zero, the model could present the user with an incorrect message: “A problem occurred during the optimization. Please contact support.”. This issue is fixed now, so if you would get this message, please contact support.

  • The data validation for Inventory Cover was not correct for the last period.

SC Navigator 4.05.01

Date November 30, 2023

• New Features

  • From this version on, data can be stored in Parquet files in Azure Data Lake Storage. Using Parquet files allows for easier integration with other systems in your organization. Furthermore, reading and writing datasets can be faster, especially for larger datasets. We will contact you to plan when we will setup Data Lake Storage and convert your existing database to Parquet files.

• Improvements

  • Data validation has been added for the case when the Maximum # of Source Locations data for customers is provided on the Product Location sheet. Please make sure to provide the Maximum # of Source Locations data for customers on the Customer Product Data sheet instead.

  • The generated summary for scenarios has been improved to provide a clearer representation of the contents within each scenario.

  • On page Results - Transport, the Rate Card Band results are now visible.

  • On page Results - End To End, filters now operate independently from the filters on other pages, providing increased flexibility to alter the view. Additionally, a filtered icon indicator has been added for enhanced visibility.

• Bug Fixes

  • In the Batch Run functionality, an error could occur when the solution was being saved to the database and the auto-generated scenario name was excessively long. As a result, the batch run process came to a halt because the long name could not be stored in the database. Now the app is able to automatically truncate the name into a shorter text, and include the original name as description.

  • When comparing Results datasets, the KPI Summary dialog now shows the Results datasets in the columns instead of the rows in a table.

  • On page Control Panel, the Model Control table now displays the section separation lines well when comparing multiple (newly saved) Results datasets.

  • On page Data - Transport, in the Transportation Data table the Force Open and Force Close columns are now always visible.

  • On page Results - Customer, the unserved demand is excluded from the lead time violation and the drive time distribution. In this case the drive time is not shown (zero).

  • On page Results - Customer, if the demand is transported to a customer with zero distance, the drive time was incorrectly -inf. Now in this case the drive time is not shown (meaning: it is zero).

  • When using side panel filters, the count of the Select/Deselect buttons were inaccurate and the clicking on the Deselect button would give an error message.

  • On page Results, the tooltip for nodes on the map now shows the location description if the Use Description Location attribute is set.

  • On page Data - Manage Data, when deleting one or more items, the text in the confirmation dialog is more accurate.

  • On page Results - Production, clicking on a production in the bottom left chart, did not update the other charts based on this selection.

SC Navigator 4.04.02

Date November 13, 2023

• New Features

  • Two template attributes have been added to the Location Product sheet: Maximum/Minimum # of Open Locations. These allow count constraints to be added for curly bracket location and product combinations. This means that the maximum/minimum number of locations (within a given location group) at which a product (individually or within a product group) is present can be enforced.

• Improvements

  • On page Data - Manage Data, the Results table has a new column: Results Type. It shows whether the result is e.g. an SC Navigator result or a CoG result (only for new saved results).

  • On page Results - End to End, the filters are updated. Groups and location views have been introduced, and they share the same design and functionality as filters on other result pages. Please note that these filters continue to operate independently from other filters.

  • For all Map widgets, Customer nodes will be hidden by default if a large number of customers are present. A toggle has been added to the filter side panels to control the visibility of customer nodes on each map.

• Bug Fixes

  • On page Scenario - Control Panel, overwriting with zero did not work properly.

  • On page Data - Manage Data, the Results table previously only included the most recent result datasets. Now it displays all stored result datasets.

  • On page Center of Gravity, the Node Filter side panel now also shows the colored icons matching the node types on the map.

  • On page Results, when the View option filter was used, the ‘filter is applied’ icon appeared on the Filters side panel tab instead of the View options side panel tab.

  • On page Results, the Transport mode filter did not work for the Active Result map. It only worked for the Reference Result map.

  • In cases where optimization is halted because of a time limit, there was an issue where the ‘Results’ section did not expand, keeping its subpages hidden. This problem is resolved, and now the pages within the ‘Results’ section will automatically expand in this situation, allowing users to easily access and review the results data.

  • In some rare instances, an error could occur stating something like: “CallerNode(1): The depth 1 is outside the range { 1 .. 0 }”. This is now prevented.

  • You could receive an incorrect message “A problem occurred during the optimization” when you used Maximum # of Destination Locations and that location would cover all the demand.

  • The data validation for transportation lanes incorrectly resulted in an error when there was a curly bracket in the period column. It would require the lane to be ‘Available’ for the period group, while this data validation should only apply to single elements.

  • On page Center of Gravity - Settings, the Grid Distance is now set to read-only when the Maximum Drive Time is not specified. The reason for this, is that the upper bound of the Grid Distance depends on the Maximum Drive Time. The tooltip of the Grid Distance will explain this.

  • On all Data pages, when data is loaded from, or saved as a dataset, the Available column is now read-only. This makes sure that rows can no longer disappear from the tables. If you want to exclude any Suppliers/ Warehouses/ Productions/ Transport Lanes from an optimization run, use the ‘Force Close’ attribute.

  • On page Results - KPI Overview, costs now appear with a minus sign if any revenue is included in the optimization. Consistently, costs and cost type custom objectives will appear with a minus sign in the full solution export if any revenue is included in the optimization. As a result, the sum on the KPI Overview page matches the profit.

  • In the SC Navigator input template on sheet Custom Objectives, the description of attribute ‘Refundable with Limit’ is corrected. The possible value descriptions didn’t match with their actual value. Consistently the documentation of refundable tax functionality is also updated.

  • In the Center of Gravity, the distance calculation did not accurately account for the wiggle factor.

  • The behavior of the Supplier filter has been corrected. Previously, when selecting all individual suppliers, the group supplier was unexpectedly unselected.

SC Navigator 4.04.01

Date October 23, 2023

• New Features

  • The Center of Gravity App has been integrated into the SC Navigator App. This brings a streamlined process enabling analyzing Centers of Gravity within the same dataset and application.

  • When there is a circular flow in the solution, a new page “Circular Flows” will show up. This page will help you finding the cause of the circular flow, such that it can be fixed in the input data.

• Improvements

  • On page Scenario - Control Panel, more attributes can be handled.

  • On page Results, colors of the node types have been changed to colors used in Network Design, and their icons also have changed for easier identification.

  • On page Results, the View options side panel now shows the colored icons in the Filter By Node Type widget. This allows you to quickly identify the node type of nodes on the Results map.

  • On page Data - Manage Data, the Scenarios table now includes an auto-generated scenario summary. This summary provides quick insights into each scenario without additional loading actions. The Save Scenario Dialog and the Load Scenario Dialog show this summary as well. Please note that the summary is only available for new scenarios.

  • Data validation has been added in case the Average Load Size data is missing for a row with Cost Per Distance / Cost Per Trip / Minimum Cost Per Trip.

• Bug Fixes

  • The list of Result Datasets that are generated during a batch solve, was not displayed correctly.

  • The changes made in version 4.03.04 with respect to the E2E volumes could result in very slow performance in some instances. This new version will be faster than before, although it will be slower than before 4.03.04.

  • The following data validation messages will no longer occur when the Available data is missing for a row with a curly bracket group in it: “WARNING: There are one or more attributes defined for (<combination including a curly bracket group>). However, this <warehouse/supplier> is not available for this product. You can make it available by specifying the ‘Available’ attribute on sheet ‘<Warehouse/Supplier (Product)>’.”

  • The data validation for Base Case Volumes now shows an error when Base Case Volumes on a last mile lane are different from the sum of demands at the customer location where the lane goes to.

  • On page Results - Transport, the charts incorrectly displayed a duplicate transportation volume due to the inclusion of both product groups and individual products in the calculation of transportation data.

  • On page Data - Transport, the Custom Objective input data for transport step was not visible when the data was not (yet) saved to the database.

  • On page Scenario - Transport, the Relative Change value was not being applied properly.

  • On page Scenario - Production, the adjustment data related to the Bill of Resource data was not being saved correctly.

  • On page Data - Warehouse, in the Inventory (Product) Data tables the Force Open and Force Close columns are now always visible.

  • On dialog page Custom Objective settings, the ‘Include in model objective’ variable can now only have binary values.

SC Navigator 4.03.06

Date September 19, 2023

• Bug Fixes

  • The data for Base Case Volume was not handled correctly when it was specified for {To location} group. It was handled as a regular group, meaning that the model was using the same value for each to-location in that group. In most cases, this would lead to an infeasible model.

SC Navigator 4.03.05

Date September 15, 2023

• Improvements

  • On page Results - Warehouse, the minimum of the y2 axis is now set to 0 for the Throughput and Inventory chart.

• Bug Fixes

  • The backwards compatibility logic did not copy the “use description” settings from the configuration to the dataset.

  • Switching Business Units could lead to the loss of dataset type information, which can result in Network Scenarios failing to load correctly.

  • The Rate Card data validation has been updated. There will now just be a warning if a package does not fit in any rate card band and there is another mode of transport available between the locations for the product and period combination. If there is no alternative lane, the validation still gives an error.

  • The model would return an incorrect fatal error when loading a dataset that had a {product group} capacity specified for a transportation type that uses rate cards.

SC Navigator 4.03.04

Date September 8, 2023

• Improvements

  • The Excel input template now has a filter set for each attribute and the top row is frozen by default.

• Bug Fixes

  • On page Results - Warehouse, the opening inventory was incorrectly calculated for group periods.

  • On page Data - Customer, after adjusting demand or lead time, the demand or lead time was not updated when the data was not saved in a dataset.

  • In some cases, when a result dataset was loaded, the order of period elements changed. This could cause the model to become infeasible.

  • The E2E volumes could be incorrect in models when there were multiple Production Facilities in one location.

  • The dialog to notify you about a new version could incorrectly appear after loading a results dataset.

  • The data validation for Forced Flow and Base Case warehouse data no longer gives an error when inventory for the product is present at the warehouse with conflicting Force Flow or Base Case Volume.

  • A model that took more than an hour to optimize would result in an error and no results would be retrieved, even when the timeout limit was set to something higher than 1 hour.

  • The Minimum and Maximum Capacities for Mode of Transport groups are now functioning properly.

SC Navigator 4.03.03

Date August 25, 2023

• Bug Fixes

  • Loading a previously saved Results dataset, could trigger an error stating “value ‘’ is outside the range domain set”. This error led to improper loading of the result data.

SC Navigator 4.03.02

Date August 22, 2023

• Improvements

  • The Manage Data page and the Select Results Dataset dialog now only show results datasets that the user can load. A user can load all self-created datasets and datasets that were shared by other users when pushing the ‘Results Visible for Everyone’ toggle when saving the dataset.

  • More Data Validations for negative input data have been added.

• Bug Fixes

  • In some rare instances, when solving the base case model, it was possible to receive a warning “A problem occurred during the optimization”, or the model could be incorrectly noted as infeasible.

  • In some cases when there was inventory cover specified, the model could be incorrectly noted as infeasible.

  • When there was inventory cover specified for the last period, an incorrect data validation message occurred, while in that case the model is just feasible as well.

SC Navigator 4.03.01

Date August 10, 2023

• New Features

  • The application now offers the ability to define roundtrips for transportation. This allows you to define opportunities for backhaul trips with own or 3rd party products. The optimization then takes these backhaul/roundtrips into account. More information about the Roundtrip functionality can be found in the documentation: SC Navigator - Roundtrip Functionality.

• Improvements

  • The background color for tooltips in map widgets has changed for better readability.

  • The generated template is now called “Template SC Navigator.xlsx” instead of “Template SC Navigator Input of Default configuration for SC Navigator.xlsx”. You are still free to change it to any name that you want to, but we believe that a shorter default name would be better.

  • The Control Panel page has been redesigned. Several widgets moved to a different, more logic, position and there are two major changes:

    1. The data from widget Run Time Options is now located at the bottom part of the Model Control widget.

    2. Instead of always showing three Custom Objectives by … widgets, we only show one, but with the ability to control which one to show via a widget action.

  • The KPI dialog page no longer shows the Custom Objectives table if there are no Custom Objectives in the model.

• Bug Fixes

  • In some cases, the data validation that checks whether there are multiple rate card drop sizes associated with a transportation lane, could incorrectly result in an error.

  • When setting all data for an attribute to 0 without first saving the data to a dataset, could result in the original value being used.

  • On page Results - Warehouse, in the Capacity Violation - All Periods chart (top left), an inactive warehouse could be marked good (green) instead of inactive (gray).

  • On page Scenarios - Transport, the middle widget (in which you can specify the change for an attribute) becomes invisible when the selected attribute does not include data. This made it impossible to create scenarios for empty attributes.

  • After a batch run, the map on the main Results page did not show the lanes because the Period Slider was no longer initialized.

  • For some users, the Product Update dialog page was shown multiple times for the same SC Navigator version. SC Navigator will now show this page only once, the first time a version is opened by a user.

  • In some rare cases, the data on the ‘Results - Cost To Serve’ page and the ‘Results - End To End’ page could be inconsistent with the rest of the results.

  • In some cases, the Main map customizations were not initialized and could get lost when a dialog page was opened.

  • On the Cost to Serve page the table header was not consistent with the value that the column showed. Now it is corrected and the value in the column depends on the selected objective filters.

  • In some cases it could happen that the included objectives may not have been consistent with the Model objective. Now the appropriate objectives are included.

SC Navigator 4.02.04

Date July 25, 2023

• Improvements

  • A new button has been added to the Data Issues page to rerun data validation before saving the dataset. The button is only available if the data has not been saved yet. It allows you to trigger the data validation manually after you have modified the data in the browser in an attempt to fix any data issues that you had before.

  • Previously, data validation ran when new data was loaded, but there was no data validation before the data was saved. Now if the data is modified before saving as a dataset, the data validation will be rerun.

  • The Excel file created via Download Solution contains two new sheets: BOM Product and Production BOM. BOM Product shows how much of each product is created or consumed for each Bill of Material. Production BOM provides insight on how much of each bill of material is produced at each production facility and its impact on the capacity and cost.

  • When selecting Maximize Cost on the Control Panel page, it automatically checks all objectives to be included in the objective.

  • In cases where the model had two equivalent solutions, one with ‘In Use’ true and the other one with ‘In Use’ false, the model did not always pick the expected solution (‘In Use’ being false). This can happen if the Volume is zero, but there is no Fixed Cost, no Minimum Throughput and no Force Open. In that case, the model could decide to either open or close the facility. In the new version, it will set ‘In Use’ to false.

  • On the Control Panel Scenario page, it is now possible to also use ‘% Change’ and ‘Value Increment’ to create scenario data for the selected attributes: Min and Max Locations/Suppliers/Warehouses/Productions. Previously ‘Value Overwrite’ was the only option.

  • The performance has been improved for models where ‘Maximum # of Source Locations’ for customers is used.

  • The performance of the optimization has been been improved, especially for datasets without inventory.

  • Filters on the main map have been updated for a better user experience.

  • On the Supplier/Production/Warehouse Results page, Capacity is added to the top right and lower left bar charts and their tooltips.

  • On the Warehouse Results page, the layout of existing tables has been improved, and a new table ‘Stock Progression’ is added to the bottom of that page.

• Bug Fixes

  • The data validation for Forced Flow and Base Case Volume has been improved.

  • The data validation message “FATAL: Attribute ‘Variable cost is for all steps’ is not consistent for all steps in sheet ‘Production’.” did not have details in the bottom table on the Data Issues page.

  • The data validation message “ERROR: A transportation lane has negative capacities or negative ‘Base Case Volume’.” did not have details in the bottom table on the Data Issues page.

  • The data validation message “WARNING: A warehouse or production has data, but it is not warehouse available nor production available.” was incorrectly generated for productions or warehouses with curly brackets.

  • Data validation has been added for the Force Close attribute.

  • The Force Close attribute was sometimes incorrectly linked to the Force Open attribute.

  • All filters are now reset after loading a results dataset.

  • On the Cost To Serve page, in chart Total Revenue and Cost, the tooltip had the incorrect label Revenue, while it should have been Cost.

  • On the Transport Results page, the bar chart sometimes showed incorrect data.

  • On the KPI Overview and Cost to Serve pages, sometimes the charts could become empty after loading a results dataset.

  • On the Location Product sheet the attribute description for ‘Max # of source locations’ and ‘Max # of destination locations’ has been improved.

  • When creating scenarios, curly bracket groups were treated as regular groups. As a result, the scenario data was applied to individual elements in those groups, instead of applying it to the group as a whole.

  • The ‘Apply Transport Scenario’ page action caused the model to use incorrect transportation data.

  • The ‘Load Warehouse Scenario’ page action was not able to retrieve the correct scenario data, resulting in no changes being applied to the Warehouse Scenario.

SC Navigator 4.02.03

Date June 23, 2023

• Improvements

  • On the Customer Scenario page, when creating scenarios for ‘Minimum Fulfillment Rate’, the ‘Value Increment’ and ‘Value Overwrite’ that were fractions previously, are now percentages. A % sign is displayed such that the user knows what type of value to enter.

  • The description about attribute ‘Minimum Fulfillment Rate’ in sheet ‘Customer Product Data’ now explicitly states that this value must be expressed as a fraction or as a percentage (in the Excel input template).

  • On the Customer Data page, the user can now directly change demand and lead time after loading an Excel file. Previously, this was only possible after saving the data as an input dataset.

• Bug Fixes

  • In some special cases, the infeasibility analysis incorrectly showed a capacity violation while there were no capacities specified.

  • The attribute ‘Variable cost is for all steps’ has been added to the Inventory sheets.

  • If there is a product with inventory cover, we validate to make sure that there is inventory available for it.

  • The data validation process used to take an excessively long time when dealing with datasets that contained a large number of locations and products. This data validation has now been improved.

  • On the Customer Data page, the Demand Adjustment and Lead Time Adjustment tables could still show data after a new dataset was loaded.

SC Navigator 4.02.02

Date June 9, 2023

• Improvements

  • On the Cost to Serve page, if you select a location on the map or the filter side panel, both charts and tables are now updated based on the selection that was made.

  • The attributes Force Open and Force Close are now always visible on data pages after loading input data from an .xlsx file.

  • On every filter side panels, single elements are now alphabetically ordered.

  • The documentation is improved and extended. At Template Attributes you can read about the different attributes that you can find in the Excel input template and throughout the SC Navigator app. This will help you understanding what effects the different attributes have and how to use them. Furthermore, some smaller improvements are made to the documentation, like links to guide you to the right topic.

• Bug Fixes

  • On the Cost to Serve page, the selected node on the map is now highlighted in a different color, such that you can easily identify the node that is selected.

  • When ‘Variable cost is for all steps’ was set, the ‘Variable Cost’ columns on the result pages were incorrect. The model results and the total cost over all steps were correct, but the costs were incorrectly distributed over the steps.

  • On the Supplier/Warehouse/Production/Transport Scenario pages, certain group elements were excluded from the scenario creation if they did not have the ‘Available’ attribute specified. With this fix, all group elements, regardless of their availability status, can now be included in scenarios.

  • When using ‘Variable cost is for all steps’ there was no data validation to check if the ‘Variable cost is for all steps’ attribute is set for each step. Now the attribute must be defined either for each step or for none of them.

SC Navigator 4.02.01

Date May 30, 2023

• New Features

  • The Force Open and Force Close attributes can now be defined for Inventory and Inventory Product. The conditional constraints for inventory and inventory product now depend on the Force Open attribute for Inventory.

  • The application now supports groups for Modes of Transport and Suppliers. This means that if you generate a new template you will see two new sheets “Supplier Groups” and “Mode of Transport Groups”, where you can specify the group definition. You can copy them to your existing sheet, if you want to. This allows you to specify data for the complete group, specify data for the group elements, and you can filter on the group elements.

• Improvements

  • The KPI Summary Dialog has a new improved layout.

  • On the Data - Transport page, the Source of Distance and the Source of Duration columns are added to the Trip Data table.

  • On the Results - Transport page, Source of Distance, Duration and Source of Duration are added to the tables whenever there is Distance data available.

  • On the Results - KPI Overview page, the (weighted average) Duration is added to the Transport tables whenever there is Distance data available.

• Bug Fixes

  • In some cases, it was not possible to load a scenario from the status bar, because the scenario category was not passed correctly to the loading scenario action. Now it is, so scenarios can be loaded from the status bar.

  • The optimization model was not using the steps in a correct way. For example, Step 3 was preceded by Step 1 instead of Step 2 so in the template the steps had to be in ascending order. Now the steps are always numerically ordered, such that the model will use them in the right order.

  • On the Results page Node Filters side panel, all node types were visible in the Filter by Node Type widget, regardless of the data in the loaded dataset. Now only node types related to the dataset are visible.

  • The color of each node type was very similar. We changed the default color of the node types, such that they are easier to identify on the map.

  • Reset map to default scale did not work. Now pressing Reset map to default scale restores the default zooming scale.

  • The maximum size of the dots on the map was too small. The maximum value has changed from 100 to 400 in the Adjusting node size option, such that the nodes can have a bigger size.

  • When single/multi sourcing is enabled, the optimality gap by default is 0.01. When multi sourcing is relaxed, it will be set to 0.001, while for relaxed single sourcing it remained 0.01. This is now made consistent, so for relaxed single sourcing the default optimality gap is now also 0.001. When the optimality gap was specified in the input Excel data file or when it is set manually on the Control Panel page, that value will be used and the defaults are ignored.

SC Navigator 4.01.04

Date May 11, 2023

• Improvements

  • The Take or Pay transportation cost can now be combined with regular transportation cost. This gave an error in the previous versions of SC Navigator.

  • It is still not allowed to combine other transportation costs. However, this now leads to a fatal error, instead of just an error as the application did previously.

• Bug Fixes

  • The Unit of Distance was not taken into account correctly for distances generated by Location IQ. This means that all those distances were in kilometers, even when the Unit of Distance was set as mile.

  • In the rare situation that the model decided that a lane was open, but with zero flow, the model could present the user with an incorrect “A problem occurred during the optimization. Please contact support.” message.

SC Navigator 4.01.03

Date May 8, 2023

• Bug Fixes

  • In some cases, the Results table on Data - Manage Data page was not showing at all, while there was data for that table. In this version, it will show this table, when there is data in it.

  • The Data validation messages have been reviewed and updated for clarity. If you encounter any unclear messages, please contact us for assistance.

SC Navigator 4.01.01

Date April 20, 2023

SC Navigator 4.0 will replace the AIMMS Network Design App that you have worked with previously. It contains all the functionality that you know from AIMMS Network Design. In addition, it has some new features:

• Stock build and stock draw

• Max profit / revenue solve

• Customer fulfillment decisions

• Improved scenario management

• Improved multi period reporting

For more details on the differences between Network Design and SC Navigator 4.0, read SC Navigator vs. Network Design

For previous versions, read SC Navigator 2 release notes.