Overview
Purpose of Inventory Planning Workbench
M3 Inventory Planning Workbench or IPW is a Web Mashup application that is designed to provide support to material and product inventory planning in manufacturing and distribution companies. This table shows how this application offers support to different roles and processes in a company:
| Role | Support |
|---|---|
| Production planners | A master scheduler viewer and planning tool that is focused on the availability and inventory levels of selected items |
| Customer service | An overview for inventory availability Indicates the items that available to sell and push for versus items that are low in inventory level where potential shortage can occur |
| Buyers | Forecast a time-phased inventory projection across different items that are grouped per supplier |
Inventory Planning Workbench is different from a single-item level material planning viewer or any advanced stand-alone planning tools. The application provides an online workbench that supports cross-assortment inventory planning that is available in a single view. It enables you to forecast, assess, and adjust your plan across multiple items in a single screen. The list of items is similar to a spreadsheet where a user can directly specify values where the plan is immediately analyzed based on the adjustments. You can also commit any plan changes to M3 Business Engine. This feature enables you to adjust, firm, and release proposals into orders and apply adjustments to the released MO-manufacturing orders.
Recommendations and restrictions
Inventory Planning Workbench, being an online application, uses M3 APIs for retrieving planning data from various tables to provide a complete material planning picture for selected warehouses and items. For each item and warehouse, Inventory Planning Workbench collects current inventory, forecasts, and all detailed open demand and supply transactions across the selected planning periods. Even for normal selections of items and warehouses needed for a specific planning scenario, we will often retrieve hundredths of thousands or millions of transactions in real time. Retrieving and loading such large volumes can take many seconds and in some cases minutes.
As a recommendation to control and limit the load time, you must break down the planning session into sub-sessions by having different favorite views for different assortments of items and subsets of warehouses to be planned.
Inventory Planning Workbench can in theory be used to load and export your entire global supply chain across all items and all warehouses but this is not recommended, nor the purpose of this application and such usage will cause load times to last for a long time, often several minutes.
Data volume directly affects Performance of Inventory Planning Workbench. These are the four main factors for data volume:
- APS policy
- Warehouse group
- Bucket horizon
- Forecast
The APS policy defines which and how many item numbers are imported. If the inventory consists of different product types, then an option is to define several APS policies one for each product type. Inventory Planning Workbench performance will then be improved when using APS policies defined for the specific task.
The Warehouse group defines which warehouses imported. If different tasks in Inventory Planning Workbench requires different warehouse, then defining several warehouse groups will improve performance.
The Bucket horizon defines how far into the future data is retrieved. This is a combination of the number of buckets and the size of each bucket.
The Forecast is optional to import and usually takes time to import. You should consider which options are required to be imported on the Data retrieval 2 tab.
Key indicators and measures
Inventory Planning Workbench is also designed to identify the highlights and exceptions of a planning process that are essential in decision making. The highlights and exceptions are defined in the application by a flexible color coding feature that enables you to identify the most critical planning issues and items that require immediate action. These key indicators and measures can help you in your decision making process:
- Dynamic coverage time per time bucket
- Coverage time in relationship to shelf-life
- Safety stock and maximum inventory violations
- Forecast fulfillment 0%
- Expected future negative shelf-life issues and positive reclassification of inventory.
Tabs and favorite views
Tabs are used to show related information about a specific item for in-depth and detailed material planning views. Tabs also enable you to view information about the current stock details down to the balance ID level. The application also offers favorite views that you can configure based on the user's preferences to include a complete setup with these features:
Selecting items to include in the view and define the sub-total groupings within the selected items
- Selecting warehouses or groups of warehouses to include in the view
- Defining the horizontal timeline, start, and length time of buckets
- Defining the rules for color coding and exception-based filters of items to view
- Adding user-defined columns in the master data per item
- Adding additional measure per time bucket such as dynamic coverage time and forecast fulfillment.