Planning Clusters in Enterprise PlanningEnterprise Planning uses planning cluster to support business procedures such as forecasting, sales, inventory planning, order acceptance, and inventory replenishment in, and between the entities that form the (internal) network of a company. The planning cluster concept provides LN with a method to plan on the proper entities, which are warehouses, sales offices, distribution centers, and manufacturing locations, and take into account the flow of goods within a company. The planning cluster concept A planning cluster is a group of warehouses in a particular geographical area. Enterprise Planning plans items for each planning cluster, which is why for each item, you can create more than one plan item. One of the characteristics of the planning cluster concept is that you can set up supplying relationships between a clustered items. This is important because these relationships enable you to build the indispensable network that Enterprise Planning must have to perform distribution requirements planning (DRP). To perform forecasting, sales order entry, and sales order acceptance on the level of a planning cluster, LN also supports master planning for planned 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 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. To set up a planning cluster You can define a planning cluster in the Planning Clusters (tcemm1135m000) session and connect it to a warehouse in the Warehouses (tcemm1112m000) session. Enterprise Planning always aggregates the planning to a specified default warehouse if there is more than one warehouse. The planning cluster is one of the segments in the plan item code. You can define planning data for each plan item in the Items - Planning (cprpd1100m000) session, such as the default warehouse, the default supply source, master-plan and time-fence settings. ATP for planned items LN fully supports the following types of available-to-promise (ATP) for planned items:
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 planning clusters online manual topic. Refer to online manual topic Example: distribution structure with planning clusters for more information about the planning cluster concept. Note On the appropriate menu in the Items - Planning (cprpd1100m000) session, you can generate a range of items based on a particular plan item (for a range of planning clusters), or based on a particular planning cluster (for a range of plan items). If you do this, Enterprise Planning also copies the relevant plan item data.
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