Clusters in Enterprise Planning

A cluster is a group of warehouses in a particular geographical area. Enterprise Planning plans items for each cluster, which is why for each item, you can create more than one plan item: a nonclustered item and the related clustered item. The only difference with a nonclustered item is that the clustered item has a cluster link: the entity where the plan item is physically stored, issued from, or comes in belongs to a certain group of warehouses: the cluster.

One of the characteristics of the cluster concept is that you can set up supplying relationships between a clustered item and a nonclustered item. This is important because these relationships enable you to build the indispensable network that Enterprise Planning must have to perform distribution requirements planning (DRP). You can set up distribution relationships an all directions, even from a clustered item to a nonclustered item.

To perform forecasting, sales order entry, and sales order acceptance on the level of a clustered item, LN also supports master planning for clustered items, which means that you can use forecasting techniques, inventory planning, available-to-promise (ATP), and (dis)aggregation functionality. The use of a master plan for clustered plan items enables you, for example, to (dis)aggregate forecasts, plans, and orders between a central office and a regional distribution center or a sales office.

You can define a cluster in the Clusters (tcemm1135m000) session and connect it to a warehouse in the Warehouses (tcemm1112m000) session. A cluster can only contain nonnettable warehouses, one of which is the default warehouse. Enterprise Planning always aggregates the planning to this default warehouse if there is more than one warehouse, just as it aggregates the planning of a nonclustered item to the default warehouse. You can define the default warehouse in the Items - Planning (cprpd1100m000) session. Enterprise Planning automatically aggregates the inventory and the demand of the plan item to this default warehouse during a planning run.

The cluster is one of the segments in the plan item code, and, as a result, for each clustered plan item you can define planning data in the Items - Planning (cprpd1100m000) session, which implies that each clustered plan item has its own default warehouse, supply source, master-plan and time-fence settings.

For more detailes information how to use clusters for each supply source, refer to the related topics.

Another supply option for clustered plan items is multisourcing, for which you can define the settings in the Sourcing Strategy (cprpd7110m000) session. You can define sourcing strategies for each clustered item.

However, you can only set up cluster-specific distribution relations for the distribution source. For the purchase and production sources you cannot define cluster-specific supplier information and a bill of material (BOM) and routing. In case of manufactured and purchased items, LN uses the same data to plan the clustered item, as well as the nonclustered item.

The use of component CTP checks and capacity CTP checks for clustered items, is restricted. For more information, refer to the Component CTP and capacity CTP for clusters online manual topic.