To use planning clusters for purchase planning

For purchased plan items, you must define the necessary data to enable Enterprise Planning to create planned purchase orders, and because plan items with a planning cluster only exist in Enterprise Planning, you must define purchase data in the Items - Purchase (tdipu0101m000) session and the Items - Purchase Business Partner (tdipu0110m000) session for the general item.

Clustered plan items also use these data.

An option for purchased plan items is to specify priority rules in the Supply Strategy (cprpd7120m000) session, if LN must make a selection out of multiple suppliers when the item is supplied by more than one. Contrary to other purchase settings, you can specify supply strategies on the level of a clustered plan item.

Enterprise Planning performs purchase planning for clustered plan items in an identical way as for non-clustered plan items, because clustered and non-clustered plan items use the same supplier data. The only data you can define on the level of a cluster are supply strategies.

However, an additional feature exists to select suppliers based on the planning cluster. To do so, you can use the Default Warehouse field on the Shipping tab of the Ship-from Business Partner (tccom4121s000) session.

If you specify a warehouse in this field, the supplier can only deliver the goods to this warehouse. Enterprise Planning only considers the corresponding supplier during planning if the default warehouse of a clustered plan item is equal to the warehouse that you defined in the Default Warehouse field in the Ship-from Business Partner (tccom4121s000) session.

An example of the use of clustered components in the bill of material (BOM) is a company structure in which multiple business units produce various products with several of the same purchased components.

This means that every business unit has a separate bill of material, but some components are used in every business unit.

When each business unit wants to buy this component from a local supplier, you can make the item clustered. In this way, you can link a warehouse to the component involved in the BOM line. If you also connect this warehouse to the corresponding local supplier in the Ship-from Business Partner (tccom4121s000) session, Enterprise Planning automatically selects the correct supplier during a planning run.

A site can be linked to only one planning cluster, but a planning cluster can contain multiple sites to perform planning for the entities and the BOMs linked to the sites within the planning cluster.

In the Items - Purchase by Site ( Items - Purchase by Site (tdipu0181m000)) session, you can specify the supplier and the pricing data for a specific site. To determine the supplier for a plan item, select a site in the Items - Planning (cprpd1100m000) session. Consequently, the supplier and the other purchasing data from the selected site is retrieved.