Warehouse Replenishment Planning Overview

This topic provides an overview of warehouse replenishment planning.

Overview

An alternative method for material planning now exist: Warehouse Replenishment Planning. Companies in which item planning activities depend on the source and target warehouse relationship leverage this Warehouse Planning functionality. Companies that do not require item warehouse specific planning should continue to use the original Material Planning functionality.

Warehouse Replenishment Planning provides the ability to perform planning functions for specific item and warehouse combinations. Order minimum and maximum values can be set for each service warehouse and a low level utility assigns the warehouse replenishment hierarchy. This enables companies the ability to setup replenishment orders for vans or trucks (setup as warehouses) to be restocked by other main distribution warehouses.

Note: Warehouse Replenishment does not support Special Pricing Agreement Inventory. A customer which plans inventory specific to SPA priced items should use Material Planning and not Warehouse Replenishment Planning.

Process Flow

Any item to be considered for Service replenishment should be signified on the Items form.

The planning values (Min, Max, and Order Multiple), primary vendor, and supply warehouse for each Item and Warehouse combination should be assigned. This is done on the Item/Warehouse Replenishment form.

The Set Warehouse Replenishment Hierarchy utility must then be run to set the warehouse planning hierarchy. Running this utility orders item warehouses properly for planning consideration (Demand is calculated from the sub service warehouses and rolled up to the supply warehouse for replenishment).

Next, you should run the Warehouse Replenishment Planning Generation utility, which creates planning records for purchases and transfers.

Using the Warehouse Replenishment Planning Workbench, the planning records can be reviewed. From this form, you can click Summary to display a similar form to the one displayed from the Summary button of the Material Planner Workbench. The form summarizes by the type of order (Purchase Order / Transfer Order) the Total Cost In Planning, and the Total Cost Chosen on the form. When you click Process,

Number of Orders and the Number of Line/Releases are displayed.
Total Cost Chosen displays the Actuals from the processed records.

Note: After the user begins to select other records for future processing, then the Total Cost Chosen is the planned cost for just the selected records.

Each planning record can be altered, and upon choosing process orders (purchase and transfer), is created for the selected records.

Highlighted Functionality

Primary Vendor Designation: A vendor can be associated to each Item and/or Service Item Warehouse combination to be used on any purchase orders created for replenishment.
Warehouse Planning: A utility similar to the Material Planner's Workbench can be run to identify upcoming demand as well as current quantity on hand levels for service warehouses.
Consumable Items: The ability to expense items and not impact inventory upon receipt in the target warehouse is provided.