Planning clusters in Enterprise Planning

Planning clusters are used to support business procedures such as forecasting, sales, inventory planning, order acceptance, and inventory replenishment per site linked to a company.

The planning cluster concept provides LN with a method to perform planning for entities such as warehouses, distribution centers, and manufacturing locations in one specific geographical location, taking into account the flow of goods within a company.

Note:

If the multisite concepts are activated, planning clusters and sites are mandatory.
Every site must have a planning cluster.
A site can be linked to one planning cluster. Planning is performed for the entities within the site.
If no planning cluster is found for a selected site, an error message is displayed.

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.

Setting up a planning cluster

Define a planning cluster in the Planning Clusters (tcemm1135m000) session.
In the Warehouses (tcemm1112m000) session, link warehouses to a specific planning cluster.

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, 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.

ATP for planned items

LN fully supports the following types of available-to-promise (ATP) for planned items:

Standard CTP
Channel ATP
Family CTP

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.

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.