Recommendations and restrictions

As an online application, IPW uses M3 APIs to retrieve planning data from various tables, providing 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, IPW can retrieve hundreds of thousands or even millions of transactions in real time. Retrieving and loading such large volumes can take several seconds and sometimes minutes.

To control and limit the loading time, we recommend breaking down the planning session into sub-sessions by having different Favorite views for various assortments of items and subsets of warehouses to be planned.

You can use IPW to load and export the entire global supply chain across all items and warehouses. However, this is not recommended, as it is not the intended purpose of the application. Such usage will cause load times to be significantly long, often lasting several minutes.

Data volume directly affects the performance of Inventory Planning Workbench. These are the five main factors for the data volume:

  1. APS policy

    This defines which and how many item numbers are imported. If the inventory consists of different product types, you can define several APS policies, one for each product type. The IPW performance improves when using APS policies defined to the specific task.

  2. Warehouse group

    This defines which warehouses are imported. If different tasks in IPW require different warehouses, then defining several warehouse groups will improve performance.

  3. Bucket horizon

    This defines how far into the future data is retrieved. It is a combination of the number of buckets and the size of each bucket.

  4. Forecast

    This is optional to import and usually takes time. You must consider which options are necessary for import on the Data Retrieval 2 tab.

  5. Include option in data retrieval

    This is designed to avoid unnecessary API calls that affect performance. Selecting Include options is useful for retrieving extra information when required.