The production, distribution, or purchase of these items is planned in Enterprise Planning based on the forecast or the actual demand.
You can plan these items by means of the following:
- Master-based planning, which is similar to master production scheduling techniques.
- Order-based planning, which is similar to material-requirements planning techniques.
- A combination of master-based planning and order-based planning.
Plan items can be one of the following:
- An actual manufactured or purchased item.
- A product family.
- A basic model, that is, a defined product variant of a generic item.
A group of similar plan items or families is called a product family. The items are aggregated to give a more general plan than the one devised for individual items. A code displayed by the item code's cluster segment shows that the plan item is a clustered item that is used for distribution planning.