Planning Clusters in Enterprise Planning

Planning clusters are used to support business procedures such as forecasting, sales, inventory planning, order acceptance, and inventory replenishment per site linked to a company.

The planning cluster concept provides LN with a method to plan on the proper entities, which are warehouses, sales offices, distribution centers, and manufacturing locations in one specific geographical location, taking into account the flow of goods within a company.

Note
  • If multisite functionality is active, planning clusters are mandatory.
  • Every site must have a planning cluster. If no planning clusters is found for a selected site, an error message is displayed.

A planning cluster represents one or more business locations for which planning processes are performed. Warehouses, work centers, sales offices and purchase offices are grouped together for planning purposes.

Each item defined in a company, can be linked to multiple sites, and one or more planning clusters. In each planning cluster a separate plan item is created with specifications unique to the site where it is manufactured.

You can set up supplying relationships between planning clusters. These relationships enable you to build the network that is used in Enterprise Planning when you perform distribution requirements planning (DRP).

To perform forecasting, LN supports master planning for planned items, which means that you can use forecasting techniques, inventory planning, available-to-promise (ATP), and (dis)aggregation functionality.

The use of a master plan for plan items enables you, for example, to (dis)aggregate forecasts, plans, and orders between a central office and a regional distribution center or a sales office.

Setting up a planning cluster

  • Define a planning cluster in the Planning Clusters (tcemm1135m000) session.

  • In the Planning Cluster field of the Sites (tcemm0150m000) session, you must select an existing planning cluster for the selected site. Clicking on the field opens the Planning Clusters (tcemm1135m000) session.

  • In the Warehouses (tcemm1112m000) session, you can link warehouses to a specific planning cluster. Note: All warehouses must be linked to the same site as the planning cluster.

    Enterprise Planning always aggregates the planning to a specified default warehouse if there is more than one warehouse.

Note

You can use the Planning Clusters (tcemm1135m000) session to define and maintain data for a planning cluster without linking warehouses.

A planning cluster with no linked warehouses is considered empty, but can be used to maintain default data when multisite functionality is active, that functions as a fall-back when no Item - Ordering Defaults by Site (tcibd2151m000) session defaults are found.

ATP for planned items

LN fully supports the following types of available-to-promise (ATP) for planned items:

The use of component CTP checks and capacity CTP checks for clustered items, is restricted. For more information, refer to the Component CTP and capacity CTP for planning clusters online manual topic.

Note

On the appropriate menu in the Items - Planning (cprpd1100m000) session, you can generate a range of items based on a particular plan item (for a range of planning clusters), or based on a particular planning cluster (for a range of plan items). If you do this, Enterprise Planning also copies the relevant plan item data.

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