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 technically use IPW to load and export the entire global supply chain across all items and warehouses, but this approach is not recommended for normal use. Use the application for targeted analysis and operational workflows, not for large, unrestricted exports of the complete global data set. When the scope includes all items and all warehouses, the amount of data that must be retrieved, processed, transferred, and rendered becomes very large. As a result, users should expect noticeably slower response times, and in many cases the load or export process may take several minutes to complete.
If the requested data volume is too large, the request might exceed the API time limit and return a socket timeout error. To investigate performance issues in detail, select . This export can help identify whether the delay is caused by the number of items, the number of warehouses, the selected time horizon, or the overall size of the request. To improve performance, narrow the export scope where possible by selecting fewer items, limiting the warehouse range, or reducing the amount of historical or planning data included in the request.
Data volume directly affects the performance of Inventory Planning Workbench. These are the five main factors for the data volume:
- 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.
- Warehouse group
This defines which warehouses are imported. If different tasks in IPW require different warehouses, then defining several warehouse groups will improve performance.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Enable feature toggle 3571924
IPW calls once for each item number. This action can affect system performance. If feature toggle 3571924 is enabled, IPW calls these programs: