Master planning, an overview

Master-planning view

Master planning works with the following types of master plans:

• Item master plan
• Channel master plan
• Resource master plan

In these master plans, planning data is maintained over a planning horizon, which is divided into time buckets or plan periods.

The length of these plan periods can vary. You can use periods with a fixed length throughout the planning horizon, but you can also use shorter periods (for example, days or weeks) for the immediate future and longer periods (for example, months) for longer-term planning.

Master-plan functionality is available for items, item/channel combinations, and resources for which you maintain a master plan. This is true for the whole planning horizon, even if you do not use master planning for supply planning.

Supply planning

During a master-plan simulation, supply is planned in the form of a supply plan. You can carry out a master-plan simulation in the following sessions:

• Generate Master Planning (cprmp1202m000)
• Generate Master Planning (Item) (cprmp1203m000)

For the supply plan, three sources of supply are used: production, purchase, and distribution (from another warehouse location in the same company, or from a related company). Accordingly, the item master plan contains the following supply plan fields:

• Production plan
• Purchase plan
• Planned distribution orders (generated outside the order horizon)

Enterprise Planning can compute these plans during a master-plan simulation. Alternatively, you can directly enter (or modify) production-plan volumes or purchase-plan volumes in the item master plan.

For the production plan, Enterprise Planning uses:

• Bills of critical materials to explode critical material requirements.
• Bills of critical capacities to calculate lead times and to determine the necessary critical resource capacity.

Master-planning engines

For master-plan-based production planning, two different planning algorithms or master-planning engines are available:

• Infinite planning
• Workload control (WLC)

In infinite planning, it is assumed that there are no serious constraints on the availability of components and capacity. Therefore, no constraints are taken into account. For more information, see Infinite master planning.

In workload control, material constraints and/or capacity constraints do play a role. Based on the idea that the workload on the job shop significantly affects the order lead time, this method aims at controlling and leveling the amount of workload. For more information, see Workload control.

By default, Enterprise Planning carries out infinite planning. If you want to use workload control, you must assign the items involved to a plan unit, and set its master-planning engine to Workload Control.