Order grouping in Enterprise Planning
Order groups are used to limit the handling of individual orders. Packages are created that contain multiple orders that can be handled as one large order. Planned orders can be grouped when they share a particular characteristic.
An order group in Enterprise Planning is a collection of planned production orders. You can collectively confirm the planned orders in an order group or transfer the planned orders to Job Shop Control.
If you transfer the planned orders of an order group, you can indicate that Manufacturing must create order groups for Job Shop Control based on the order groups in Enterprise Planning. Then, you can use those order groups to collectively perform actions, such as release production orders or generate outbound advice for materials.
Only planned production orders that belong to the actual scenario can be part of an order group.
A planned order can belong only to a single order group.
Definition of order groups
You can create order groups, based on different criteria, such as:
- Order status
- Start date or finish date
- Routing group
- Warehouse
- Work center, task, or machine
- Required tools
- Main item or range of item codes or item characteristics
- Used materials
You can manually add or remove planned orders to or from an order group.
Automatic-update order groups
An order group without the automatic-update feature can be modified only by manually adding or removing planned orders.
An automatic-update order group stores a set of planned orders and a set of criteria. If you run the order planning process with the automatic-update feature activated, LN rebuilds the order group and includes the planned orders that currently match the criteria and are not yet part of another order group.
Example
If you create an order group without the automatic-update feature for planned production orders using machine TGGU2, and a later order-planning run generates more planned orders for the same machine, the new planned orders are not part of the order group.
If you create an automatic-update order group for planned production orders using machine TGGU2, and a later order-planning run generates more planned orders for the same machine, these new orders are added to the order group when you update the order group.
Overlapping criteria
If you define two automatic-update order groups with overlapping criteria, and a planned order belongs to both order groups, the planned order is included only in the first matching order group.
Example
First, you created order group G10034. G10034 contains planned orders for item A.
Then, you created order group G20001. G20001 contains planned orders linked to planner J.
If a planned order for item A is linked to planner J, the planned order is included in the G10034, which was created first, but the planned order is not included in G20001.
Maximum size
To avoid order groups with an impractically high number of planned orders, you can define a maximum size.
Removing planned orders and deleting order groups
If an order group without the automatic-update feature does no longer contain any planned orders, LN deletes the order group. This can occur when all planned orders have been transferred, or when the planned orders were deleted, or when you removed the planned orders from the order group manually.
LN does not automatically delete automatic-update order groups.