A day in life of a Planner

Safe Harbor Statement

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may
not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should
not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality
described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
Overview:
Typically, Data collection will be run in the early morning hours as scheduled job. Data collection will collect all the
business objects, as selected during the collection run, like transactional data and master data. An ‘Integrated Supply and
Demand’ Planning Central Plan can then be triggered as batch process. This plan run generates Forecast and Supply
recommendations. The PC planners come in the morning and start reviewing the plan’s output. They review important
business measures/KPIs and exceptions. They analyze the plan thoroughly, take the necessary corrective actions and
finally release the planning recommendations to execution system. During the work day, dynamic changes may happen
with respect to demands, supplies, resources, BOM, Routings or any other planning data elements. To evaluate the
impact of these intraday changes the planner may run numerous simulations to quantify the impact on the plan.

1. Data Collection:
Collection can be carried out from the Fusion source by launching an enterprise schedule process through the Collect
Planning Data page. Using this page, collections can either be run as needed or scheduled to run periodically. Collection
from Fusion source can be carried out in either net change or targeted modes.

Typically, Collection process will be scheduled to support a daily planning run.

2. View Collected Data :
It is a good practice to review some of the important business objects to ensure all the necessary data are correctly
collected over.

2.1 In the Planning Central work area, navigate to the panel drawer Plans > Plan Inputs, and from the Actions
menu, select Open. The planner can view the collected data for the following business objects:

 Approved Supplier Lists

 Approved Supplier Capacity (drill down from list of item suppliers)

 Calendars

 Currencies

 Demand Classes

 Item Costs

 Item Structures

 Items

 Resource Requirements

 Resources

 Work Definitions

 Supply and Demand business objects (Forecasts, On Hand, Purchase Orders and Requisitions, Sales
Orders, Transfer Orders, Work Orders and so forth)

 Units of Measure

2.2 View Collected Data through Supply Network Model

The planner can view the collected data for Organizations, Customers, Suppliers, Carriers, and Shipping
Networks from the Maintain Supply Network Model page. Navigate to this page by selecting the
corresponding task from the Planning Central work area.

In the Planning Central work area, navigate to Tasks panel drawer > Plan Inputs > Maintain Supply Network
Model
3. Analyze the plan and take corrective actions :
The best way to start analyzing the health of the plan is through plan summary. It provides a bird’s eye view of the
plan. Plan Summary is a high-level graphical overview of a plan’s performance. It measures plan performance
against a company’s targets. The first step for a Planner will be to open the plan summary page and take a look at
important measures/KPIs. These Measures/KPIs can be configured based on the company’s business objects.

3.1 View Plan Summary page:

On the plan summary page , there are 6 predefined/preconfigured infotiles which can be straightaway used.

 Revenue and Margin

 Forecast Comparison

 Shipments Forecast MAPE

 Inventory Turns

 Demand at Risk

 Rescheduling Exceptions
Each infotile has one or more related graphs with predefined drill-to-actions to display additional information
about that KPI. The planner will then use the ‘drill-to-actions to further analyze the plan.

One of the best practices is to start with ‘Demand at Risk’ Infotile. This infotile shows the value of ‘At risk’
demands by product category as shown below.

In the above screen, the planner can see that when the ‘Demand at Risk’ tile is selected, the content area
displays a breakdown of ‘Demand at risk’ by product category. With this type of graph, called a tree map, the
planner can see categories that have a high value of ‘Demands at Risk’, the blue rectangles. The large blue
rectangle shown here for ‘Vision Tablets’ indicates the product category has a significant amount to demands
which are at risk; an issue that planner would want to analyze further.
The planner can now right-click on the ‘Vision Tablets’ rectangle and can drill to anyone of the navigation
options displayed here.

3.2 View Demand Fulfillment page:

As a best practice, select ‘Demand Fulfillment’ option as shown above. This will open up ‘Demand Fulfillment
‘page as shown below:

The chart on the Demand Fulfillment view shows the cumulative value of the demand that is at risk, plotted
against the number of supply orders that Planning Central has recommended to meet those demand. Using
this chart , Demand Fulfillment prioritizes and summarizes at-risk demands and related recommendations so
that planner can achieve the greatest improvement to demand fulfillment position with least amount of effort.
Planners can take actions to accept recommendations directly within Demand Fulfillment.
Follow these steps to use demand fulfillment:

3.2.1 First you identify the at-risk demands you want to address. At-risk demands can be selected either
by:

 Using search panel to filter at-risk demands by customer, item, organization, and so on.

 Drilling to Demand Fulfillment from another view in which case context is passed and search is
automatically conducted. For example, you could be looking at a bar chart that indicated a certain
product category had a higher at-risk demand value than other product categories. You can select that
product category and drill to demand fulfillment to see all at-risk demands for that product category.

Each at-risk demand will have one or more pending recommendations that need addressing as shown
below:

The ‘at risk’ demand will have an “at-risk” status until all the pending recommendations are
approved or marked as complete. There are 5 types of recommendations that can be associated to
an at-risk demand; three expedite recommendations, for buy orders, make orders and transfers,
and two add capacity/availability recommendations. Each of these types of recommendations are
displayed in their own tab as shown above. You can choose to view all recommendations
associated to all at-risk demands, or choose to view just the recommendations associated to the
demand or demands that are selected.
3.2.2 Review the associated recommendations and take actions by:

 Accepting expedite recommendations which firms orders based on their expedite or need by, date.

 Increasing resource capacity in the source system and then marking add resource capacity
recommendation as complete

 Increasing supplier capacity in plan inputs and marking add supplier capacity recommendation as
complete.

3.2.3 Save the changes.

3.2.4 Run the plan see the effect of actions taken on recommendation. From the plan summary page,
click on ’actions’ and select ‘Run’ as shown below.
Once the plan completes, review the ‘Demand at Risk’ again using plan summary as shown below. The
planner will notice that ‘Demand at Risk’ has reduced.
3.3 View other Predefined views :

Apart from Plan summary and demand fulfillment page, there are other predefined views which planners
can use to further analyze the supply and demand.

3.3.1 Supply and demand view: The supplies and demands view displays individual supplies and demands
and the relationship between them, or pegging. The planner can query individual supply and
demand for a particular item or a category or by planner or more complex search criteria can be
used. He/she can then further analyze the plan. They can view pegging or drill to other pages like
resource requirement, material plan, and items. They can edit existing orders or create new
demands or supplies to perform what-if analysis
3.3.2 Exceptions view: Planners can view all exceptions for his/her item category. They can fully
configure the exceptions view as per their requirement. Use the filters as required. Based on the
exceptions, they can then drill to other pages and analyze the plan further.

3.3.3 Material plan: Material Plan is a predefined, time-phased view of the material across the plan
horizon for any item/organization combination. Planners can use material plans to view supply/demand
measures/KPIs like Safety stock, PAB, total supplies, total demand. They can drill to other pages as
required. It is a nice tool to get a bird’s eye view of time phase projected inventory levels. As a part of best
practice, review material plans for all important categories/items.
 3.3.4 Items : Starting with items page , planners can drill to other pages like

 Item Exceptions

 Item Structures

 Routings

 Suppliers

 Supplies and Demands

 Supply Chain Bill

4 Release the plan recommendations :

Once the plan is analyzed, it is time for the planner to release the orders to source. The orders that were firmed by
accepting the expedite recommendation need to be marked for release using the Supplies and Demands UI before they
can be released. Expedited orders can be selected by drilling from the expedite recommendations to supplies and
demands, which will automatically filter supplies and demands to show the expedited order, or the planner can open
supplies and demands separately and filter for all firmed orders.

Once the planner has located the orders they want to release, they can view the release-related fields using a pre-seeded
layout called “Release”. To mark the order, or orders, for release, select the desired orders and select the Mark for
Release action from the Actions menu. Upon completion of the Mark for Release action, the release status will be
“Marked for Release”.

Finally, after marking orders for release, the planner would release the order back to Oracle Fusion by selecting the
Release plan action found on the page-level Actions menu.
Steps to release orders:

4.1 Open Supply and Demand view and filter the supplies as per your requirement.

4.2 Mark the orders for release.

 4.3 Using ‘Actions’ button, select ‘release’ to release the orders to source.

5 Perform Simulations if required :

During the day , if the demand/Supply picture changes or if the planner would like to simulate effect of Item or
supply chain related attribute changed then the planner can run the simulation plan and analyze the effected of
those changes on the plan output.