Enterprise Planning Master Data

Scenarios are used to simulate planning runs for various business situations. Only one scenario can be the actual scenario, representing the actual plan that is transferred to production, purchase and warehousing.

The scenario-planning horizon can be divided in to plan periods of various lengths. This allows forecasting and planning in small periods on the short-term and in longer periods in the longer-term. The scenario can be defined as rolling, which will periodically redivide the scenario-planning horizon in plan periods starting with the current date. This offers a consistent period division for the planner as time passes.

Static data such as supplying and sourcing strategies and dynamic data such as planned orders can be copied between scenarios. Relationships between a central scenario and local scenarios in a multisite environment can be defined, this allows a central planning run that triggers the local planning runs. Data, such as forecast and orders, can be aggregated and disaggregated between the local scenarios and central scenario.

The planning settings for an item is defined in Item Planning Data, which is an aggregate of multiple plan items. Another important setting is the default source, which determines if the item is supplied by production, purchase or distribution. When selecting the default source production/purchase the actual source is determined by the Date-Effective Item Data session. The horizons to generate planned orders and plans for each plan item can be defined. Additionally it can be defined whether or not a plan item has an item master plan and the types of capable-to-promise that are used for promising the item to customers.

In Enterprise Planning, production facilities are referred to as resources. A resource in Enterprise Planning corresponds to a work center in Manufacturing. Every work center in Manufacturing is defined as resource in Enterprise Planning. Resources are used to provide information about available capacity, capacity utilization, the resulting free capacity and capacity capable to promise.

Plan units are used to manage interdependencies that exist in constraint-based production planning. A plan unit groups plan items that must be planned together because of capacity or material constraints. Plan units are only necessary for workload control.

Sourcing is the method to determine the source of supply for a plan item to satisfy demand.

The supplying relationships between clusters can be defined. A cluster is a group of entities without the restriction that the entities are all of the same type and belong to the same financial company or logistic company. These relationships represent the possible supplies between warehouses. Enterprise Planning always translates the cluster to the default warehouse in that cluster. The supplying relationships are selected based on the supply strategy. If no supplying strategy is applicable, they are based on the priorities in the supplying relationships.