Planning Clusters in Enterprise Planning

A planning cluster represents one or more business locations for which planning processes are performed. Warehouses and sites are grouped together for planning purposes.

Each item defined in a company can be linked to multiple sites, and one or more planning clusters. In each planning cluster a separate plan item is created with specifications unique to the site where it is manufactured, bought or received from another planning cluster.

You can set up supplying relationships between planning clusters. These relationships enable you to build the network that is used in Enterprise Planning when you perform distribution requirements planning (DRP).

To perform forecasting, LN 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 distribution center and a regional distribution center or a sales office.

If the multisite concepts are activated, planning clusters are added to the sites of the warehouses. In the Planning Cluster field of the Sites (tcemm0150m000) session, you must select an existing planning cluster for the selected site. Clicking on the field opens the Planning Clusters (tcemm1135m000) session. See Defining enterprise units and entities.

Enterprise Planning always aggregates the planning to a specified default warehouse if there is more than one warehouse.

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.