Aggregated planning

In Enterprise Planning, you can use carry out planning at various levels of aggregation: from general product groups to individual products. Moreover, you can exchange data between these levels through aggregation relationships:

  • Aggregate data to a more general product level.
  • Disaggregate data to a more specific product level (families).

This aggregation concept has several applications:

  • You can group items into product families, which can be planned collectively.
  • You can combine items that belong to different channels, or sites.

The following examples demonstrate the use of aggregation relationships:

Example: standard product-family structure

A family of bikes has two child items: red bikes and blue bikes. The forecast is made by color, and then aggregated to the family level to get an overview of the total forecast.

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Example: aggregation through a distribution structure

You have a manufacturing site M1 with two distribution centers (DC1 and DC2) that each make a forecast:

[...]

M1 can then aggregate the forecast from DC1 and DC2 to get an overall forecast.

Example: Multisite aggregation

You have five sites:

  • Two sales offices, S1 and S2
  • Two manufacturing sites, M1 and M2
  • A central headquarters (CHQ) that performs coordinated planning.
[...]

The forecast can be aggregated from S1 and S2 to CHQ. A production plan is established centrally. This production plan can then be disaggregated to the production sites.

Types of (dis)aggregated data

As a rule, you can aggregate and/or disaggregate the following types of data:

  • Production plans
  • Production orders
  • Purchase plans
  • Purchase orders
  • Production receipts
  • Purchase receipts
  • Distribution orders
  • Distribution receipts
  • Demand forecasts
  • Inventory plans
  • Extra demand

LN automatically aggregates goods-flow data for a family item to plan items with Family item type. LN cannot disaggregate these data.

How to set up aggregation relationships

You can manually define aggregation relationships in the Aggregation Relationships (cprpd3110m000) session, or let LN create aggregation relationships between a specific family item and an entire range of sub-items in the Generate Aggregation Relationships (cprpd3211m000) session.

You can define aggregation relationships between items (or families) on any plan level. This provides a lot of flexibility:

  • You can use aggregation relationships to explode the forecast demand of a product family directly to the components of the family, which can also be families.
Aggregation from channel master plans to item master plan

If you want to aggregate data from one or more channel master plans to the corresponding item master plan, you need not define aggregation relationships for this. You can use the Aggregate Channel to Item Master Plan (cpdsp5210m000) session to carry out this type of aggregation directly.

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