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, IPW collects current inventory, forecasts, and all detailed open demand and supply transactions across the selected planning periods. Even for regular selections of items and warehouses needed for a specific planning scenario, you will often retrieve hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions in real time. Retrieving and loading such large volumes can take many seconds and sometimes minutes.

As a recommendation to control and limit the loading 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.

You can use Inventory Planning Workbench to load and export your entire global supply chain across all items and 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 the performance of Inventory Planning Workbench. These are the four main factors for the data volume:

  1. APS policy

    The APS policy defines which and how many item numbers are imported. If the inventory consists of different product types, the option is to define several APS policies one for each product type. Inventory Planning Workbench performance is then improved when using APS policies defined for the specific task.

  2. Warehouse group

    The Warehouse group defines which warehouses are imported. If different tasks in Inventory Planning Workbench requires different warehouse, then defining several warehouse groups will improve performance.

  3. Bucket horizon

    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.

  4. Forecast

    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.