Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. Disclaimer 1
2. Introduction 2
2.1. Purpose of Document 2
3. New and Changed Features in Value Chain Planning 3
3.1. Oracle Value Chain Planning 3
3.1.1. Release 12.1.1 3
3.1.1.1. Backward Compatibility to 11i10 3
3.1.2. Release 12.2.5 3
3.1.2.1. New Look and Feel Based on Alta Skin 3
3.1.3. Release 12.2.6.1 4
3.1.3.1. ADF Setup Screens 4
3.1.4. Release 12.2.6.2 4
3.1.4.1. Functional Security for ADF UIs 4
3.2. Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 6
3.2.1. Product Overview 6
3.2.2. Release 12.1.1 7
3.2.2.1. Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard 7
3.2.2.2. Supply Chain Analyst Dashboard 9
3.2.2.3. Analytical Framework 10
3.2.2.4. Scenario Management 10
3.2.2.5. Supply Chain Planning Web Services 10
3.2.2.6. Seeded BPEL Processes 11
3.2.2.7. Process Automation 11
3.2.2.8. Activity Management 11
3.2.3. Release 12.1.2 11
3.2.3.1. Compatibility with 11.5.10 Planning Server 11
3.2.3.2. Integration to Third Party Planning Systems 12
3.2.3.3. Ability to Run APCC Standalone 12
3.2.3.4. Rich User Interface Enhancements 13
3.2.4. Release 12.1.3 13
3.2.4.1. Analysis of Inventory and Service Levels 13
3.2.4.2. Analysis of Excess and Obsolescence 13
3.2.4.3. Enhanced Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard 13
3.2.4.4. Supply Chain Risk Management Dashboard 14
3.2.4.5. Revenue Gap Analysis 15
3.2.4.6. Collaboration Workspaces for Unstructured Collaboration 15
3.2.4.7. Enhanced Exceptions Analysis 15
3.2.4.8. Integration with Rapid Planning 16
3.2.4.9. Plan Versus Collected Data Comparison 16
3.2.5. Release 12.1.3+ 16
3.2.5.1. New Dimension – End Item 16
3.2.5.2. New Dimension – Parent Model 17
3.2.5.3. ASCP Material Plan 17
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document ii
3.2.5.4. ASCP Resource Plan 18
3.2.5.5. Item Simulation Set Window 19
3.2.5.6. ASCP Orders Window 19
3.2.5.7. Related Exceptions 20
3.2.5.8. Launch Plan 20
3.2.5.9. Parallel Processing of Plan Archival 21
3.2.5.10. Configurable Time Levels During Plan Archival 22
3.2.5.11. Turn Off Archival of Complex Measures 22
3.2.5.12. Configurable Currency Conversions 23
3.2.6. Release 12.2 23
3.2.6.1. Plan-specific Forecasting Measures 23
3.2.6.2. Custom Series from Demantra DM and RT S&OP 24
3.2.6.3. Support for Custom Demantra Product Hierarchy 24
3.2.6.4. Integration with Distribution Planning 24
3.2.7. Release 12.2.4 25
3.2.7.1. Custom Hierarchies 25
3.2.7.2. Custom Measures 25
3.2.7.3. Projected On Hand 25
3.2.7.4. Total Demand Fulfilled 25
3.2.7.5. Build Plan 26
3.2.7.6. Order Details 26
3.2.7.7. Archive DRP Plans to APCC 27
3.2.7.8. Support for Predictive Trade Planning Measures 27
3.2.1. Release 12.2.4.1 30
3.2.1.1. High Volume Detailed Reporting 30
3.2.2. Release 12.2.5 31
3.2.2.1. Support for Multiple Manufacturing Calendars 31
3.2.2.2. Support for Additional Category Sets 31
3.2.2.3. Enhancements to New Material Plan 31
3.2.2.4. Project Driven Supply Chain Dashboard 31
3.2.2.5. Supply Chain Analyst Dashboard Enhancements 32
3.2.2.6. New OBIEE Versions 35
3.2.3. Release 12.2.6 35
3.2.3.1. Policy Planning Dashboard 35
3.2.3.2. Support for creating APCC scenarios with multiple SPP Plans 36
3.2.3.3. New Profile Option to specify Category Set for Policy Planning dashboard 36
3.2.4. Release 12.2.8 36
3.2.4.1. Discontinuation of WebCenter Support 36
3.3. Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning 36
3.3.1. Release 12.1.1 36
3.3.1.1. Oracle Transportation Management Integration 36
3.3.1.2. Optimization Enhancements 37
3.3.1.3. Contiguous Processing 37
3.3.1.4. Minimum Remaining Shelf Life 37
3.3.1.5. Distribution Planning Scalability Enhancements 38
3.3.1.6. End Item Substitution Enhancements 38
3.3.1.7. Production Schedules as Inputs 38
3.3.1.8. Safety Lead Time 39
3.3.1.9. Customization of Horizontal Plan 39
3.3.1.10. Supply Tolerancing Enhancements 39
3.3.1.11. Buy Order Processing Lead Time Backward Compatibility 40
3.3.2. Release 12.1.2 40
3.3.2.1. Release Recommendations for Internal Requisitions 40
3.3.2.2. Turn Off Planned Order Creation 40
3.3.2.3. Consume Purchase Orders in First In, First Out Sequence 41
3.3.3. Release 12.1.3 41
3.3.3.1. Forecast Spreading Based on Shipping Calendar 41
3.3.3.2. Excluding Planned Orders from Supply Tolerancing 42
3.3.3.3. Maximize Use-Up of Substitute Components 43
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document iii
3.3.3.4. Distribution Planning Enhanced Order Modifier Support 44
3.3.4. Release 12.1.3+ 44
3.3.4.1. Forecast Explosion Enhancements 44
3.3.4.2. Collections Enhancements for Asset Intensive Planning 45
3.3.4.3. Maintenance Plan Inputs to ASCP 45
3.3.4.4. Returns Forecast 45
3.3.4.5. Repair Planning 45
3.3.4.6. Respect CMRO Reservations 46
3.3.4.7. New Order Types for Asset Intensive Planning 46
3.3.4.8. New Supply/Demand Attributes for Asset Intensive Planning 46
3.3.4.9. Horizontal Plan Enhancements for Asset Intensive Planning 47
3.3.4.10. Exceptions for Asset Intensive Planning 47
3.3.4.11. Release Enhancements for Asset Intensive Planning 47
3.3.4.12. Display of Recipe Information 47
3.3.4.13. Integration to Rapid Planning 48
3.3.4.14. New Material Plan 48
3.3.4.15. New Resource Plan 49
3.3.4.16. Customized Demand and Supply Export to Excel 49
3.3.4.17. Enhanced Consideration of Recipe Effectivity Dates 50
3.3.4.18. Post-processing Lead Time for Make Orders 51
3.3.4.19. Forecast Spreading Based on User-defined Calendar 51
3.3.4.20. Maintenance Work Order Aggregation 51
3.3.4.21. Critical Path Information in Enforce Demand Due Date Plans 52
3.3.4.22. Profile Option to Enable Post-processing Lead Time for Make Orders 52
3.3.4.23. Minimum Remaining Shelf Life for Forecasts 53
3.3.4.24. Parallel Collections 53
3.3.5. Release 12.2 56
3.3.5.1. Supplier Capacity Consumption Enhancement 56
3.3.5.2. Enhanced Exception Management 57
3.3.5.3. Access to Advanced UI Screens from EBS Navigator 57
3.3.5.4. Enhanced Access to Advanced UI Screens from Planner Workbench 57
3.3.6. Release 12.2.4 58
3.3.6.1. Support for Premium Resource Capacity Constraints 58
3.3.6.2. Support for Warehouse Capacity Constraints 58
3.3.6.3. Minimum Remaining Shelf Life (MRSL) Enhancements 59
3.3.6.4. Enforcing Process Effective Dates 61
3.3.7. Release 12.2.4.1 62
3.3.7.1. Integration between Primavera P6 and Advanced Supply Chain Planning 62
3.3.7.2. Minimum Remaining Shelf Life for Distribution Planning 63
3.3.8. Release 12.2.5 64
3.3.8.1. Maximize Resource Utilization in Day Level Planning 64
3.3.8.2. Collections Filters 64
3.3.8.3. Demand Schedule-Specific Forecast Processing 65
3.3.8.4. New Supply Planning Work Area 65
3.3.8.5. ASCP ADF UI - Enhanced Supplies and Demands View 66
3.3.8.6. ASCP ADF UI - Personal Queries 66
3.3.8.7. ASCP ADF UI - Plan Summary 66
3.3.8.8. ASCP ADF UI – Plan Options 66
3.3.8.9. ASCP ADF UI – Exceptions Management 67
3.3.8.10. Project Netting Enhancements 67
3.3.8.11. Expanded Reservations in Day Level Planning 68
3.3.8.12. Purchasing Integration Enhancements 70
3.3.9. Release 12.2.6 71
3.3.9.1. Master Scheduling Enhancements 71
3.3.9.2. Exception-related Attributes in Supplies and Demands ADF UI 71
3.3.9.3. Improvements to Favorites ADF UI 72
3.3.9.4. Product Definition ADF UI 73
3.3.9.5. Supply Chain Bill ADF UI 73
3.3.10. Release 12.2.6.2 74
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document iv
3.3.10.1. Organization Security Support in the Supply Planning Work Area 74
3.3.10.2. Supplier Plan 74
3.3.10.3. Delete Plan from Supply Planning Work Area 74
3.3.10.4. Additional Order Types for New Material Plan 74
3.4. Oracle Collaborative Planning 75
3.4.1. Release 12.1.1 75
3.4.1.1. Export Exception Details 75
3.4.1.2. Detailed Supply Commit Based on ASCP Pegging 75
3.4.1.3. Search Exceptions by Buyer and Planner 75
3.4.2. Release 12.1.2 75
3.4.2.1. Rich User Interface Enhancements 75
3.5. Oracle Demand Planning 76
3.5.1. Release 12.1.1 76
3.5.1.1. Clear Data in Worksheets 76
3.5.1.2. Default Even Allocation Over Time 76
3.5.1.3. Plan Security by Responsibility and Organization 76
3.5.1.4. Sort by Product in Planning Percentages Worksheet 76
3.5.1.5. Data Selection Tools for Region Copy Selector 76
3.5.1.6. Prevent Planners from Editing Measures in View Scope 76
3.5.2. Release 12.2.5 77
3.5.2.1. Retirement of Oracle Demand Planning 77
3.6. Oracle Demand Signal Repository 77
3.6.1. Product Overview 77
3.6.2. Release 12.1.1 77
3.6.2.1. Customer Organization Hierarchy 77
3.6.2.2. Multiple Calendar Support 78
3.6.2.3. Customer Item Hierarchy 78
3.6.2.4. Manufacturer Item Hierarchy 78
3.6.2.5. Multiple Currency Support 79
3.6.2.6. Alternate Units of Measure 79
3.6.2.7. Authorized Distribution 79
3.6.2.8. Sales Allocation 79
3.6.2.9. Sales Facts 79
3.6.2.10. Shipments 80
3.6.2.11. Orders 80
3.6.2.12. Inventory 80
3.6.2.13. Sales Forecasts 80
3.6.2.14. Promotion Plans 80
3.6.2.15. Category Sales Analysis Dashboard 80
3.6.2.16. Product to Category Coverage Reports 81
3.6.2.17. Category Growth Analysis Reports 81
3.6.2.18. Category Sales by Type Reports 81
3.6.2.19. Average Price Analysis Report 82
3.6.2.20. Top and Bottom Performers Reports 82
3.6.2.21. Ad-Hoc Reporting 82
3.6.2.22. Sales Scorecard 82
3.6.2.23. Supply Chain Scorecard 83
3.6.2.24. Operations Scorecard 83
3.6.2.25. Demantra Demand Management Integration 83
3.6.2.26. Retail Merchandising System (RMS) Integration 83
3.6.2.27. Web Services Integration 83
3.6.3. Release 12.1.2 83
3.6.3.1. Exception Management Dashboard 83
3.6.3.2. All Commodity Volume (ACV) / External Measures 84
3.6.3.3. TDLinx Store/Outlet Adapter 85
3.6.3.4. Scorecard Enhancements (Goals & Thresholds) 85
3.6.3.5. Store Clusters 86
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document v
3.6.3.6. Item Clusters 86
3.6.3.7. Replenishment Rules 87
3.6.3.8. Allocation Rules 88
3.6.4. Release 12.1.3 88
3.6.4.1. Manufacturer Promotions 88
3.6.4.2. Manufacturer Shipments 89
3.6.4.3. Customer Shipment Facts 89
3.6.4.4. Third Party Distributors 89
3.6.4.5. Alternate Organization Hierarchy 90
3.6.4.6. Forecast Type and Purpose Code 92
3.6.4.7. User Defined Fields 92
3.6.4.8. Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimensions 93
3.6.5. Release 12.2 93
3.6.5.1. Uptake of ODI 93
3.6.6. Release 12.2.5 93
3.6.6.1. New OBIEE Versions 93
3.7. Oracle Demantra – All Products 94
3.7.1. Release 12.2 94
3.7.1.1. Calendar Month Support in Weekly System 94
3.7.1.2. Import from Excel 94
3.7.1.3. Engine Performance Improvements 94
3.7.1.4. Subset forecasting 94
3.7.1.5. Analytical Engine on Solaris 10 94
3.7.1.6. Improved Multi-Language Support 95
3.7.1.7. Technology Stack 95
3.7.1.8. Demand Variability Definition 95
3.7.1.9. Configure Rolling Profile Groups 95
3.7.1.10. Integration Data Profile Hints 95
3.7.1.11. Database Performance Improvements 95
3.7.1.12. Asynchronous Workflow Support 96
3.7.2. Release 12.2.4 96
3.7.2.1. User Access Control 96
3.7.2.2. Support Additional Demantra Hierarchies in APCC 97
3.7.2.3. Launch Management to Support New Product Introductions 97
3.7.3. Release 12.2.5 97
3.7.3.1. Oracle Alta Look and Feel 97
3.7.3.2. Global Instance Support 97
3.7.3.3. Workflow Recoverability 98
3.7.3.4. Improved Security and Single Sign on Support 98
3.7.3.5. Collect Data Above Site Level 98
3.7.4. Release 12.2.6 99
3.7.4.1. Remove Applet Dependency 99
3.7.4.2. Demantra Anywhere Enhancements 99
3.7.5. Release 12.2.6.1 99
3.7.5.1. Demantra Environment Display and Management 99
3.7.5.2. Open Attachments from My Tasks 99
3.7.5.3. Control of Summary Column Width 99
3.7.5.4. Demantra Anywhere Enhancements 99
3.7.6. Release 12.2.6.2 100
3.7.6.1. Remove Java Applet Dependency from Workflow Manager 100
3.8. Oracle Demantra – Demand Management 100
3.8.1. Release 12.2 100
3.8.1.1. Enhanced Integration with Advanced Planning Command Center 100
3.8.2. Release 12.2.5 100
3.8.2.1. Publish Intermittency Flag to IO 100
3.9. Oracle Demantra – In-Memory Consumption Driven Planning 100
3.9.1. Release 12.2.4 101
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document vi
3.9.1.1. Store Level Forecasting and Fulfillment 101
3.9.1.2. BLE Clustering 101
3.9.1.3. Analytical Engine 64 bit 101
3.9.1.4. Engine performance Improvements 101
3.9.1.5. General Level with Daily Information in a Weekly System 101
3.9.1.6. BLE Context Passing 102
3.9.1.7. BLE Net Change 102
3.9.1.8. New Store Introduction 102
3.9.1.9. New Item at Store Introduction 102
3.9.2. Release 12.2.5 102
3.9.2.1. Removal of Dependency on Oracle Engineered Systems 102
3.9.2.2. New OBIEE Versions 103
3.10. Oracle Demantra – Real-time Sales and Operations Planning 103
3.10.1. Release 12.2 103
3.10.1.1. Improved Cost Modeling 103
3.10.1.2. Enhanced Integration with Advanced Planning Command Center 103
3.11. Oracle Demantra – Predictive Trade Planning 104
3.11.1. Release 12.2 104
3.11.1.1. Enabling ‘Dynamic Open Link’ capabilities and Demantra Anywhere 104
3.11.2. Release 12.2.4 104
3.11.2.1. Support Trade Hierarchies and Data in APCC 104
3.11.2.2. Streamlined Promotion Creation and Improved Method Usability 104
3.11.2.3. Calendar Enhancements 104
3.11.2.4. Streamlined Simulation 105
3.11.2.5. Enhanced Support for Shipment and Consumption Planning 106
3.12. Oracle Demantra Trade Promotion Optimization 106
3.12.1. Release 12.2 106
3.12.1.1. Enabling Nodal Tuning 106
3.12.1.2. Enhancements to Optimization 106
3.12.1.3. Calendar Optimization 107
3.13. Oracle Global Order Promising 107
3.13.1. Release 12.1.3 107
3.13.1.1. Enhanced Forward ATP 107
3.13.2. Release 12.1.3+ 107
3.13.2.1. Asset Intensive Planning Enhancements 107
3.13.3. Release 12.2.5 108
3.13.3.1. Account for ECO Dates in Forward ATP 108
3.14. Oracle In-Memory Performance Driven Planning 108
3.14.1. Product Overview 108
3.14.2. Release 12.2.4 109
3.14.2.1. Dramatic Improvement in Performance 109
3.14.2.2. Complete Support for Oracle Real Application Clusters 110
3.14.2.3. Performance Improvement Through Parallel Architecture 110
3.14.2.4. New Visualizations in Advanced Planning Command Center 111
3.14.3. Release 12.2.5 113
3.14.3.1. Removal of Dependency on Oracle Engineered Systems 113
3.14.3.2. New OBIEE Versions 114
3.14.4. Release 12.2.6 114
3.14.4.1. Retirement of Oracle In-Memory Performance Driven Planning 114
3.15. Oracle Inventory Optimization 114
3.15.1. Release 12.1.1 114
3.15.1.1. Support for Intermittent Demands 114
3.15.2. Release 12.1.3 114
3.15.2.1. Enhanced Budget Constraints 114
3.15.3. Release 12.1.3+ 115
3.15.3.1. Asset Intensive Planning Enhancements 115
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document vii
3.15.3.2. Warehouse Capacity Constraints 115
3.15.3.3. Accounting for Cycle Stock in Safety Stock Calculations 115
3.15.3.4. Publishing Warehouse Capacity and Cycle Stock Facts to APCC 116
3.15.3.5. Warehouse Capacity and Cycle Stock Reports 116
3.15.4. Release 12.2.4 116
3.15.4.1. Accounting for Supply Variability in Warehouse Capacity Constraints 116
3.15.5. Release 12.2.5 117
3.15.5.1. Receive Intermittency Flag from DM 117
3.15.5.2. Oracle Alta Look and Feel 117
3.15.6. Release 12.2.6 117
3.15.6.1. Policy Planning support 117
3.15.6.2. Policy Parameter specifications through the “Policy Parameter Set” 118
3.15.6.3. Plan Option Changes 119
3.15.6.4. New profile to determine Loss Function based safety stock calculation 120
3.15.6.5. Two tiered Service Level specification 120
3.15.6.6. New fields in IMM to specify Policy Parameters 120
3.15.6.7. Calculation of Policy Parameters 121
3.15.6.8. New Material Plan to view Policy Parameters 122
3.15.6.9. Additional links from Inventory Planner responsibility 123
3.15.6.10. Additional group for viewing Policy Parameters in the IMM 123
3.16. Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling 123
3.16.1. Release 12.2.5 123
3.16.1.1. Retirement of Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling 123
3.17. Oracle Production Scheduling 124
3.17.1. Release 12.1.1 124
3.17.1.1. Units of Measure on Items 124
3.17.1.2. Enhanced Alerts 124
3.17.1.3. Work Order Centric KPI Comparisons 125
3.17.1.4. Access Operation and Routings from Operation Instances 126
3.17.1.5. Auto-create Work Orders Directly from Demands 126
3.17.1.6. Find Functionality for Model Objects 127
3.17.1.7. Visibility to Demand Fulfilled via Starting Inventory 128
3.17.1.8. Automatic Reconciliation of Schedule Backlog 128
3.17.1.9. Batchable Resources 129
3.17.1.10. Consistent Resource Assignment within a Portion of a Routing 130
3.17.1.11. Resource-specific Cycle Times for Campaign Run Optimization 132
3.17.1.12. Minimize Work Order Schedule Infeasibilities 133
3.17.1.13. Disable Units of Effort for Setup and Cleanup Operations 134
3.17.1.14. Resource “All of” Sets 135
3.17.1.15. Hard Links between Work Orders 138
3.17.1.16. Dynamic Throughput Rates on Resources 140
3.17.1.17. PS Data Connector Port to Sun, HP and AIX 142
3.17.1.18. Export Selected Model Data during Schedule Publish 142
3.17.1.19. PS XML Model – Unique Extension 143
3.17.1.20. Enhanced Auto-generated Routings 143
3.17.1.21. Selective Work Order Release to Production 144
3.17.2. Release 12.1.2 145
3.17.2.1. Resource Business Objectives 145
3.17.2.2. Production Scheduling as a Web Service Call 146
3.17.2.3. Undo Functionality for Manual Scheduling 146
3.17.2.4. Attribute Based Sequence Dependent Setups 148
3.17.2.5. Visualization of Campaign Run Optimization Cycle Boundaries 149
3.17.2.6. New Alert Type and Drilldowns 150
3.17.2.7. Drilldowns from the Work Order Editor to the Gantt Charts 151
3.17.2.8. Mass Change on Items and Resources 152
3.17.3. Release 12.1.3 153
3.17.3.1. Maintenance Work Order Scheduling 153
3.17.3.2. Disable Multiple Release from the Same Plan for the Same Order 158
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document viii
3.17.3.3. User Defined Ideal Sequence 160
3.17.3.4. Supply Tolerancing 161
3.17.3.5. Control Application of Purchase Item Order Multiples beyond Lead Time 162
3.17.3.6. Improved Operation Status Logic in OPM integration 164
3.17.3.7. Advanced Work Order Filtering 164
3.17.4. Release 12.1.3+ 166
3.17.4.1. Collections from Oracle CMRO 167
3.17.4.2. Consideration of Visit Priorities 168
3.17.4.3. Maintenance Exceptions 169
3.17.4.4. Critical Path Visualization 169
3.17.4.5. Maintenance Key Performance Indicators 171
3.17.4.6. Inventory Reservations 172
3.17.4.7. Visualization of Related Work Orders 172
3.17.4.8. Improved Operation Visualization 173
3.17.4.9. Oracle Enterprise Asset Maintenance Integration 174
3.17.4.10. Resource Sequence View 176
3.17.4.11. Shift Utilization Reporting 178
3.17.4.12. Usability Enhancements 179
3.17.4.13. Improved Treatment of Firm Work Orders 184
3.17.4.14. Visibility to Maintenance Visit Status 185
3.17.4.15. Allow Offloading Flag in the Work Order BOM 185
3.17.5. Release 12.2.4 185
3.17.5.1. Multi-Stage Synchronization 185
3.17.5.2. Manual Scheduling Mode 190
3.17.5.3. Resource Sequence View Enhancements 191
3.17.5.4. Work Order Filter by Attribute and Dimming/Hiding Control 193
3.17.5.5. Exception Framework: Filtering and Additional Fields 195
3.17.5.6. Combined View Resource Gantt and Item Graph: Show Produced/Consumed Operations 196
3.17.5.7. Work Order Merge Mode 196
3.17.5.8. Production Pegging View: Drill Down from Supply Event 197
3.17.5.9. Navigate between Operations while Operation Properties Page is Open 197
3.17.5.10. Pegging Details in Operation Properties Page 197
3.17.5.11. Middle-Mouse Button Draws Vertical Line in Schedule Views 198
3.17.5.12. Work Order Mass Change of Firm Status 199
3.17.5.13. Consistent Where Used Tabs in Object Properties 199
3.17.5.14. New Where Used Tab in Shared Storage Space Properties Page 199
3.17.5.15. New Solver Options: Scheduling Bucket and Pre-build Policy 200
3.17.5.16. Solve Time Limit and Display of Incomplete Schedule 201
3.17.5.17. Display Item Code and Description 202
3.17.6. Release 12.2.5 202
3.17.6.1. Oracle Alta Look and Feel 202
3.17.6.2. Post Publish Customization Hooks 204
3.18. Oracle Rapid Planning 206
3.18.1. Product Overview 206
3.18.2. Release 12.1.3 206
3.18.2.1. Fast Simulation 206
3.18.2.2. Flexible User Interface 206
3.18.2.3. Simulation Sets 207
3.18.2.4. Mass Edits 207
3.18.2.5. Plan Comparisons 207
3.18.2.6. Aggregate, Editable Material Horizontal View 208
3.18.2.7. All-in-one Supply/Demand View 208
3.18.2.8. Integration with Advanced Planning Command Center 208
3.18.2.9. Unconstrained Planning 208
3.18.2.10. Constrained Planning 209
3.18.2.11. Demand Forecasts 209
3.18.2.12. Respect Demand Priority Rules 209
3.18.2.13. Demand and Supply Pegging 209
3.18.2.14. Supply Chain Sourcing 210
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document ix
3.18.2.15. Supplier Capacity 210
3.18.2.16. Bills of Material and BOM Effectivity 210
3.18.2.17. By-products and Co-products 211
3.18.2.18. Routing Operation and Resource Scheduling 211
3.18.2.19. End Item Substitution 211
3.18.2.20. Lead Times and Planning Time Fence 211
3.18.2.21. Order Modifiers 212
3.18.2.22. Safety Stock Lead Time 212
3.18.2.23. Shipping, Receiving and Carrier Calendars 212
3.18.2.24. Planner Action: Firm Existing Supplies 212
3.18.2.25. Planner Action: Firm Planned Supplies 213
3.18.2.26. Release New Planned Orders and Reschedule Recommendations 213
3.18.2.27. Exceptions 213
3.18.2.28. Embedded Analytics 214
3.18.2.29. Late Demand Diagnosis 215
3.18.2.30. Global Forecasting 215
3.18.2.31. Configure to Order 215
3.18.2.32. Default Order Sizing 216
3.18.2.33. Inventory Reservations 217
3.18.2.34. Clear to Build 217
3.18.2.35. Rapid Planning – Sales and Operations Planning Integration 218
3.18.2.36. Rapid Planning – Global Order Promising Integration 218
3.18.2.37. Order Comparison 218
3.18.2.38. Multi-Planner Collaboration 218
3.18.2.39. Functional and Data Security 218
3.18.3. Release 12.1.3+ 219
3.18.3.1. Demand Pull-In and Upside Processing 219
3.18.3.2. Favorite Lists 220
3.18.3.3. Safety Stock Enhancements 221
3.18.3.4. Simulation Edits of Additional Item Attributes 222
3.18.3.5. Simulation Edits of Approved Supplier Lists and Supplier Capacity 222
3.18.3.6. Simulation Edits of Processes 223
3.18.3.7. Mass Update Enhancements for Resource Availability 223
3.18.3.8. Mass Update Enhancements for Firm Date on Demands and Supplies 224
3.18.3.9. Scheduling Rapid Planning Runs in Batch Mode 224
3.18.3.10. Enhanced Search Capability 224
3.18.3.11. Material Plan Display Order 224
3.18.3.12. Display of Decimal Precision 224
3.18.3.13. Last Saved Information for Plan Options 225
3.18.3.14. Blow Through Phantom Items in Clear to Build 225
3.18.3.15. Global Forecasting Display in the Material Plan 225
3.18.3.16. Auto-release of Planning Recommendations 225
3.18.3.17. Natural Time Fence 226
3.18.3.18. Multiple Analytics Layouts per User 226
3.18.3.19. Enhanced Sales Order Comparison View 226
3.18.3.20. Revenue by Week 227
3.18.3.21. Quantity-based Safety Stock 227
3.18.3.22. Integration to Inventory Optimization 227
3.18.3.23. Flexible Consumption of Substitute Component Supplies 228
3.18.3.24. Integration to Collaborative Planning 228
3.18.3.25. Integration to Advanced Supply Chain Planning 228
3.18.3.26. Enhanced Integration to Advanced Supply Chain Planning 228
3.18.3.27. Fixed Days Supply Order Modifier 229
3.18.3.28. Enforce Sourcing Splits 229
3.18.4. Release 12.2 230
3.18.4.1. Clear to Build Analysis Enhancements 230
3.18.4.2. Save Plan Performance Enhancement 231
3.18.5. Release 12.2.4 231
3.18.5.1. Clear to Build Enhancements 231
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document x
3.18.5.2. Ship Sets 232
3.18.5.3. Batch Simulation and Plan Copy 233
3.18.5.4. Support for Externally Generated Demand Priorities 233
3.18.6. Release 12.2.5 234
3.18.6.1. Support for Line Rates 234
3.18.6.2. Support for Engineering Change Orders (ECO) based on Use Up Effectivity 234
3.18.6.3. Totals in Horizontal Plan 235
3.18.6.4. Oracle Alta Look and Feel 236
3.18.7. Release 12.2.6.2 236
3.18.7.1. Support for Phantoms 236
3.19. Oracle Service Parts Planning 237
3.19.1. Product Overview 237
3.19.2. Release 12.1.1 237
3.19.2.1. Integrated Demand and Supply Planning 237
3.19.2.2. Service Parts Planning Workbench 237
3.19.2.3. Integration to Spares Management for External Repairs 238
3.19.2.4. Integration to Depot Repair for Internal Repairs 238
3.19.2.5. Support for Part Condition 238
3.19.2.6. Criticality Matrix 238
3.19.2.7. Support for Supersessions 238
3.19.2.8. Returns Forecasts 238
3.19.2.9. Minimize New Buys 239
3.19.2.10. Life Time Buys 239
3.19.2.11. Planner Work Lists 239
3.19.2.12. Integration with Collaborative Planning 239
3.19.2.13. Supersession Chain-Specific Replanning 239
3.19.2.14. Execution Net Change Planning 239
3.19.3. Release 12.1.2 240
3.19.3.1. Multi-process Inline Forecasting 240
3.19.3.2. Intermittent Demand Flag 240
3.19.3.3. Planner Worklist Enhancement 240
3.19.4. Release 12.1.3 241
3.19.4.1. Re-order Point-based Parts Planning 241
3.19.4.2. Import into a Simulation Set 241
3.19.4.3. Integration with Advanced Supply Chain Planning 241
3.19.4.4. Integration with APCC - Service Parts Planner Dashboard 242
3.19.5. Release 12.1.3+ 243
3.19.5.1. Fair Share 243
3.19.5.2. Query-based Auto-release 243
3.19.5.3. Collect Installed Base under Contract 244
3.19.5.4. Collect Field Replaceable Unit Bills of Material 244
3.19.5.5. Supersession Notes 244
3.19.5.6. Reserved Safety Stock 244
3.19.5.7. Sourcing Priorities for Inventory Rebalancing 245
3.19.5.8. Avoidance of Circular Rebalancing 245
3.19.6. Release 12.2.4 245
3.19.6.1. Integration to Enterprise Asset Management 245
3.19.6.2. Exhaust Existing Supplies (Repair First) 245
3.19.6.3. Rebalancing Source Priority (Replenish before Rebalance) 246
3.19.7. Release 12.2.5 246
3.19.7.1. Parts Classification 246
3.19.7.2. Stocking Thresholds 246
3.19.7.3. Fair Share Enhancements 247
3.19.7.4. Exceptions Enhancements 247
3.19.7.5. Preserve Manual Forecasts 247
3.19.8. Release 12.2.6 248
3.19.8.1. Policy Planning: Summary of key features 248
3.19.8.2. Plan Option Changes 249
3.19.8.3. SPP Plans as Demand Schedules to other SPP Plans 249
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document xi
3.19.8.4. Reading Policy Parameters from Oracle Inventory Optimization 249
3.19.8.5. Considering Policy Parameters specified in Item Attribute Mass Maintenance 250
3.19.8.6. Policy Planning related Measures in SPP 250
3.19.8.7. Editable Measures and Overrides in Policy Planning 252
3.19.8.8. Policy Types considered in SPP Policy Planning 252
3.19.8.9. Single and Time Phased Replenishments 253
3.19.8.10. Enhancement to Parts Classification functionality 253
3.19.8.11. New Service Parts Planning Work Area 254
3.19.8.12. SPP ADF UI – Plan Options 254
3.19.8.13. SPP ADF UI – Items View 257
3.19.8.14. SPP ADF UI – Material Plan 262
3.19.8.15. SPP ADF UI - Supplies and Demands 267
3.19.8.16. SPP ADF UI - Favorites including Plan Summary 267
3.19.8.17. SPP ADF UI - Preferences 268
3.19.8.18. SPP ADF UI – Replan Options 268
3.19.8.19. SPP ADF UI – Create Plan 270
3.19.8.20. SPP ADF UI – Copy Plan 270
3.19.8.21. SPP ADF UI – Launch Plan 271
3.19.8.22. SPP ADF UI – Release Plan 272
3.19.8.23. SPP ADF UI – Seeded Layouts 273
3.19.9. Release 12.2.6.2 273
3.19.9.1. Organization Security Support in the Service Parts Planning Work Area 273
3.19.9.2. Delete Plan from Service Parts Planning Work Area 274
3.20. Oracle Strategic Network Optimization 274
3.20.1. Release 12.1.1 274
3.20.1.1. Supply Chain Risk Management 274
3.20.1.2. Alerts 275
3.20.1.3. Key Performance Indicators 277
3.20.1.4. Usability Enhancements 279
3.20.2. Release 12.1.2 281
3.20.2.1. Aggregate Assignment Set and Lane Definition 281
3.20.3. Release 12.2 282
3.20.3.1. Specify Scenario File in the Plan Options 282
3.20.3.2. Solver Upgrade 283
3.21. Oracle Value Chain Planning Integration Base Pack (EnterpriseOne – VCP Integration) 284
3.21.1. Release 12.2.5 284
3.21.1.1. User Interface for Setups 284
3.21.1.2. Support for Alternates 284
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document xii
1. Disclaimer
This Release Content Document (RCD) describes product features that are proposed for
the specified release of the Oracle E-Business Suite. This document describes new or
changed functionality only. Existing functionality from prior releases is not described. It
is intended solely to help you assess the business benefits of upgrading to the specified
release of the Oracle E-Business Suite.
This document in any form, software or printed matter, contains proprietary information
that is the exclusive property of Oracle. Your access to and use of this confidential
material is subject to the terms and conditions of your Oracle Software License and
Service Agreement, which has been executed and with which you agree to comply. This
document and information contained herein may not be disclosed, copied, reproduced or
distributed to anyone outside Oracle without prior written consent of Oracle. This
document is not part of your license agreement nor can it be incorporated into any
contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates.
This document is for informational purposes only and is intended solely to assist you in
planning for the implementation and upgrade of the product features described. 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 in this document remains at the sole discretion of
Oracle.
Due to the nature of the product architecture, it may not be possible to safely include all
features described in this document without risking significant destabilization of the
code.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Purpose of Document 1
2. Introduction
The features and enhancements described in this document are grouped by product, and
then by the release in which they first became available, for example, “Release 12.1.1”.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Purpose of Document 2
3. New and Changed Features in Value Chain Planning
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Value Chain Planning 3
Selected screens from products with non-ADF-based user interfaces (Demantra products,
Production Scheduling) sport new color and graphical element themes that match those
of the Oracle Alta skin.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Value Chain Planning 4
Supplier Plan Access Supplier Plan (Work MSC_WA_NEW_SUP_HP
Area) _FN
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Value Chain Planning 5
Manage Organization Access Manage Organization MSC_WA_MANAGE_PA
Parameters Parameters (Work Area) RA_FN
Most supply chain planning processes, considered in their entirety, consist of multiple
decision-making sub-processes often performed by different groups that are chained
together. For example, a typical sales and operations planning cycle consists of
forecasting performed by different lines of business such as sales, marketing, finance and
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 6
manufacturing and distribution, a consensus demand review, inventory planning and
review, supply planning and review, and executive review. These sub-processes may be
supported by different underlying supply chain planning applications (Demand
Management, Inventory Optimization, Strategic Network Optimization, Service Parts
Planning and Advanced Supply Chain Planning.) The overall planning processes are
difficult to orchestrate because the planning data required are buried in multiple
underlying supply chain planning applications and because the human stakeholders come
from multiple organizations.
Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center is a new product that pulls together
planning outputs from multiple E-Business Suite supply chain planning applications and
makes them available for reporting and analysis within a unified user interface based on
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). The planning outputs are
viewable via seeded role-based dashboards, and are also accessible to custom OBIEE
reports and dashboards constructed by the user. Seeded dashboards support the Sales and
Operations Planning and Supply Chain Plan Analysis business processes.
Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center offers an extensive list of web services that
decompose Oracle Advanced Planning capabilities into atomic functional pieces (for
example, run collections, generate a statistical forecast, run a supply chain plan, archive
a plan.) These web services are leveraged by seeded Oracle Business Process Execution
Language (BPEL) processes that can be used out of the box to automate Sales and
Operations Planning and Forecast, Inventory and Supply Planning business flows. Users
can also create an infinite variety of custom BPEL processes to automate and orchestrate
their specific in-house planning flows (for example, hub and spoke planning).
Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center provides extensive plan and scenario
comparison capabilities. It also allows you to assign manual activities required for the
evaluation and execution of alternative business scenarios and monitor and orchestrate
the completion of those activities.
• the ability to automate, orchestrate, monitor and review the result of complex,
inter-organizational and inter-disciplinary planning processes that span multiple
supply chain planning applications (including external applications).
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 7
The Supply Review page answers questions such as:
• Are we supply constrained?
• Where are our resource constraints?
• Are we producing to plan?
The Executive Review page answers questions such as:
• Are we on plan financially?
• For which product categories are we revenue targets?
Dashboard level reports provide easy comparison of S&OP scenarios.
Reports in the Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard drill directly into underlying
Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning worksheets, Advanced Supply
Chain Planning (ASCP) plans and Strategic Network Optimization (SNO) plans for
seamless extended analysis.
The following reports are available at the page level in the Sales and Operations
Planning Dashboard:
Executive Review
• Executive Summary
• Consolidated Analysis
• Profit and Loss
• Constrained Forecast Comparison
• Cumulative Budget Tracking
• Key Performance Indicators
• Forecast Accuracy
• Customer Service
• Inventory and Production KPI
• Top Difference - Operating Plan and Budget by Category
• Profitability KPI
• Cost Breakdown KPI
Demand Review
• Forecast Comparison
• Forecast Accuracy
• Projected Backlog
• Top Forecast Attainment by Category
• Forecast – Scenario Comparison
• Top Abs Diff – Consensus Forecast and Budget by Category
• Consensus Forecast Difference by Customer
• Consensus Forecast Difference by Customer
Supply Review
• Consolidated Analysis
• Demand Fill
• Production to Plan by Organization
• Production Plan
• Top Resource Utilization
• Top Supplier Capacity Utilization
• Consolidated Analysis – Scenario Comparison
• Bottom Demand Fill % by Customer
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 8
• Supply Change by Category
• Production Plan Comparison by Organization
Plan Health
• shipment and production trends
• demand and supply summary
• resource summary
• exceptions summary
Demand and Supply
• demand and supply summary
• demand change by customer
• supply change by category
• demand and supply trends
• demand by customer
• supply by category
Resources
• resource summary
• most utilized resources
• least utilized resources
• resources with most change in utilization
• resource utilization trend
Exceptions
• demand exceptions summary
• inventory exceptions summary
• alternate exceptions summary
• reschedule exceptions summary
• resource exceptions summary
• exceptions summary by category
• exceptions summary by organization
Historical Performance
• key supply chain performance metrics (shipments to plan, production to plan,
resource utilization, inventory value, days of cover)
• supply chain metrics trend
Scenario Analysis
• This page is similar to the Plan Health page. It allows you to compare demand
and supply summary information, resource information, and exceptions across
scenarios instead of across plans. (A scenario is a grouping of plans whose
results should be added together and viewed as a whole.)
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 9
3.2.2.3. Analytical Framework
APCC provides a central Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)-based
repository that automatically pulls plan data from a wide cross-section of Advanced
Planning applications (Demand Management, Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning,
Advanced Supply Chain Planning, Inventory Optimization and Strategic Network
Optimization), as well as execution data (orders, shipments, inventory, WIP completions,
etc.) from Oracle E-Business Suite. APCC contains more than 200 measures (both stored
measures that are read into APCC and measures such as costed inventory that are
derived), rationalized against a consistent set of dimensions. More than 20 dimensions
are seeded.
Scenario Sets are groupings of related scenarios (for example, alternate supply/demand
scenarios being evaluated within a particular sales and operations planning cycle). You
can also use scenario sets to group and filter data in APCC dashboards and reports.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 10
3.2.2.6. Seeded BPEL Processes
Two seeded BPEL processes take leverage the supply chain planning web services
offered by APCC to automate and orchestrate key supply chain planning flows.
The Forecast, Inventory, and Supply Planning BPEL process automates a sequence of
running collections, generating a forecast in Demantra Demand Management (DM),
running an Inventory Optimization (IO) plan utilizing the DM output as input, running an
Advanced Supply Chain Planning plan using the DM and IO plan outputs as input.
The Sales and Operations Planning BPEL process runs collections, creates financial
forecast review, sales forecast review, marketing forecast review, and demand forecast
review activities and assigns them to key stakeholders, uploads the consensus forecast
from Demantra Real-Time Sales & Operations Planning (RT S&OP) to the planning
server, runs a Strategic Network Optimization (SNO) plan with the RT S&OP consensus
forecast as input, pulls the SNO constrained forecast/production plan output back into
RT S&OP, then creates consensus demand review and executive review activities and
assigns them to the appropriate stakeholders.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 11
APS Operational Data Store
11.5.10
APS 11.5.10
Oracle Demantra 7.1/7.2
Out-of-box
Integration.
MultipleEBS
Multiple EBS(11.5.10)
(11.5.10) Collect into both User Option
or Legacy instances instances at Plan
or Legacy instances launch to
“push”
APS 12.1
APS Operational Data Store
12.1
Advanced Planning
Command Center 12.1
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 12
3.2.3.4. Rich User Interface Enhancements
APCC incorporates new rich user interface capabilities of E-Business Suite 12.1.2. These
include a redesigned applications home page with more efficient navigation, multi-level
navigation menus with saved favorites, "look-ahead" lists of values that automatically
complete partial user entries, and inline file attachments for process activities.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 13
o Operating Plan
o Financial Forecast
In addition, the existing reports have been updated with new usability enhancements and
new navigations to more drill-down reports. Also, a new tab called Financial Review has
been added with the following reports
o Financial Summary
o Operating Plan and Financial Forecast Comparison
o Top % Difference - Operating Plan and Budget by Category
o Financial Trend Analysis
o Profit & Loss Monthly
o Margin Difference by Category
o Year-over-Year Financials
o Financial Forecast and Budget Comparison
o Top % Difference - Budget and Annual Plan by Organization
o Top Revenue
o Cost by Organization
o Bottom Margin
o Profitability KPI
o Cost Breakdown KPI
This new Financial Review page enables planners and executives to answer questions
like:
o Are we on plan financially?
o How are product categories performing financially?
o What has changed financially since last fiscal quarter/month?
o How/Where/Why has profitability changed?
o Is there any need to revise financial forecast?
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 14
3.2.4.5. Revenue Gap Analysis
This feature enables Supply Chain Analysts and Sales and Operations Planners to do
additional reporting and analysis to close gaps between the current shipment rate and the
revenue targets established as part of the sales and operations plan. This is most critical
as the end of a period or quarter approaches and gaps remain.
The Supply Chain Analyst (SCA) dashboard has been enhanced to add the following
reports in the Scenario analysis tab:
o Backlog Analysis – Units & Value
o Bookings Performance – Units & Value
o Current Shipment Plan
o Demand and Supply Summary
o Demand Utilization – Units & Value
o Demand Utilization Split – Baseline Plan
o Left to Book - By Quarter
o Sales Order Analysis – Units & Value
o Shipment Performance – Units & Value
o Supply Utilization – Units & Value
The Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) dashboard has also been enhanced to add /
modify the following reports:
o Current Shipment Plan
o Supply Summary
Each group space is linked to a Scenario created in Advanced Planning Command Center
and users can choose to auto-create a group space when a scenario is created.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 15
o Reschedules Exceptions Summary
o Exception Summary by Category
o Exception Summary by Organization
The Advanced Planning Command Center’s Supply Chain Analyst dashboard supports
drill-down directly into the Rapid Planning application.
All Rapid Planning simulation plans can be used in the Process Automation functionality
to build process flows in Advanced Planning Command Center.
• Order Quantity
• Total Supply
Using the Order Quantity measure and the Order Type filter, users can analyze all
upstream component supplies (such as On Hand, Shipment Receipts, Purchase Orders,
and Planned Orders) and see the breakdown by End Items (Finished Goods) that are
driving the component demand.
This dimension is available in the seeded Advanced Planning Catalog. There are no new
seeded reports that use this new dimension.
Note: This dimension is enabled only when the profile option "MSC: Enable Model and
End Item Dimensions in APCC" is set to Yes.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 16
3.2.5.2. New Dimension – Parent Model
This is a new one-level dimension that enables users to build reports for analysis of
Options in ATO models by the Parent Model based on forecast explosion in an ASCP
Plan. This feature is available in ASCP plans only, and is enabled for the following two
measures only:
• Order Quantity
• Total Supply
Using the Order Quantity measure and the Order Type filter, users can analyze all option
supplies (such as On Hand, Shipment Receipts, Purchase Orders, and Planned Orders)
and see the breakdown by Parent ATO Models that are driving this option demand.
This dimension is available in the seeded Advanced Planning Catalog. There are no new
seeded reports that use this new dimension.
In the case where the Options are manufactured assemblies, even their components will
have the break-up by the Parent Model so that end users can analyze all upstream
components and understand the source of their demand by viewing the break-up by the
Parent Model.
Note: This dimension is enabled only for those options and key components that are
assigned to a special category set. The name of the category set is based on the profile
option "MSC: APCC Key Component Category Set."
Note: This dimension is enabled only when the profile option "MSC: Enable Model &
End Item dimensions in APCC" is set to Yes.
The new Material Plan displays demand and supply for the selected items in a bucketed
fashion including the totals. The Material Plan allows in-place editing. You can update
demand quantities (“forecasts”, “manual demands”) and supply quantities (“planned
orders”). Changes to the bucketed values are allocated down using a proportional rule
and the underlying planned orders will be firmed.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 17
Key features of the new Material Plan are:
• User-defined layouts
• Page filters of Organization, Category Set, Category
• Ability to hide/show totals for selected items/categories
• Color coding to highlight editable cells and user edits
You can navigate to the new Material Plan from Supply Chain Analyst dashboard reports
like “Demand and Supply Totals by Category” and “Aggregate Horizontal Plan”,
carrying in the context of a specific organization or category. You can also access the
new Material Plan from the new “ASCP Plan Actions” section of the Plan Health
Summary and Demand and Supply Tabs.
You can integrate the new Material Plan into custom dashboards and reports.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 18
• User-defined layouts
• Page filters of Organization, Department, Resource
• Ability to hide/show totals for selected departments, resources
• Color coding to highlight editable cells and user edits
In Advanced Planning Command Center, the new Resource Plan can be accessed from
the Supply Chain Analyst dashboard report “Most Utilized Resources”, carrying in the
context of a specific resource. It is also accessible from the new “ASCP Plan Actions”
section of the Plan Health Summary and Demand and Supply Tabs.
You can integrate the new Resource Plan into custom dashboards and reports.
The key features included in the new Item Simulation Set window are:
• Basic and Advanced Search, with an ability to save searches
• Mass Edit of multiple items and multiple attributes in a single user action
In Advanced Planning Command Center, the new Item Simulation Set window can be
accessed from the Supply Chain Analyst dashboard using the link in the “ASCP Plan
Actions” section of the Plan Health Summary and Demand and Supply Tabs.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 19
The key features included in the Orders Window are:
• Basic and Advanced Search, with an ability to save searches
• Edit, Firm, and Implement Release recommendations
In Advanced Planning Command Center, the new Orders window can be accessed from
the Supply Chain Analyst dashboard using the link in the “ASCP Plan Actions” section
of the Plan Health Summary and Demand and Supply Tabs.
You can integrate the Orders window into custom dashboards and reports.
For the late demands in the selected Organization or Item, the drill-down navigates to the
following new windows with the context described below:
• Related Material Constraints: Navigates to the new Orders window (described
above) using the context of all upstream components of the selected demands
that have a material constraint exception.
• Related Resource Constraints: Navigates to the new Resource Plan (described
above) using the context of all upstream resources used in the supplies pegged to
the selected demands that have a resource constraint exception.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 20
Launch plan options include an ability to run either a batch replan (using the "Net
Change Simulation" option) or a full replan with snapshot.
Net Change Simulation is the recommended option when you have done simulation edits
such as material quantities/dates or resource availability. The full replan option is
recommended when you have done updates to item attributes in the simulation set.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 21
3.2.5.10. Configurable Time Levels During Plan Archival
Prior to 12.1.3.9, in APCC, many facts were processed during archival at day level.
These included supplies, demands, exceptions, and resource facts. However, Advanced
Planning Command Center users typically view information at higher levels of Period
and Week. Hence there was a lot of redundant information being processed and stored in
APCC.
Archival is now supported only at either Manufacturing Weeks or Periods. You can
select the archival level.
Even when you select the Week level, the archival process will still support roll up of
data into months (in the fiscal period hierarchy) by breaking down the weeks into smaller
reporting units wherever there are month boundaries as shown below:
Hence the month totals will still be accurate and not get skewed because of the time
granularity selected during archival.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 22
Method 2 – Profiles
You can also use the following profiles to configure selection of these measures for
archival. These are all site level profiles.
The configuration done in the User Interface above (Method 1) overrides the profiles
(Method 2.)
You can provide a plan name as a parameter in the new Demantra workflow processes
called “Publish S&OP-APCC Measures” (for RT S&OP) and “Publish DM-APCC
Measures” (for DM). These serve the same purpose as the current workflow “Export
OBI-EE Data” and the concurrent program “Assign Plan Name.”
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 23
3.2.6.2. Custom Series from Demantra DM and RT S&OP
You can configure the integration data profiles in Demantra to publish custom series
created in either DM or RT S&OP to APCC. By default, this feature collects any 15
measures (10 forecasting measures and 5 historical measures) that you choose. You can
alter the mix or add more measures by running a new concurrent program, “Collect
Demantra customization information to APCC”. The selected series must not have any
complex calculations or client expressions in Demantra.
You must set the profile “MSC: Additional Demantra Item Hierarchy in APCC” to the
name of the hierarchy in Demantra and then run the standard “Refresh APCC
Materialized Views” concurrent program to make that custom hierarchy available in
APCC. None of the seeded reports or dashboards use this custom hierarchy.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 24
The seeded reports and dashboards in APCC are not designed for DRP plans or scenarios
with DRP plans. You should build custom reports or dashboards for analyzing DRP
plans. You can also use the spreadsheet file upload capabilities to load DRP plan data
into APCC.
Similarly, users will now be able to upload custom organization and customer hierarchies
into APCC using csv files. These hierarchies can have a maximum of 10 levels each.
These organization and customer hierarchies can alternatively be collected from
Demantra. The names of the hierarchies are governed by the profiles "MSC: Additional
Customer Hierarchy in APCC" and "MSC: Additional Organization Hierarchy in
APCC". You must run the concurrent program "Refresh APCC Materialized Views"
after setting up these profiles.
• Projected On Hand
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center 25
For a given item org, it is calculated as the sum of upstream pegged supply quantities by
date (to all demands for this item org). The granularity is Item, Organization, Date. This
measure provides information about exact, incremental supply availability dates based on
pegging that the Constrained Forecast does not. It is available for ASCP and RP plans
only.
• Total Supply
• Total Demand
These measure values will show the quantities for each component item across all end
items. They are still published to APCC at the Item, Org, Day level. In the Build Plan,
they are aggregated to the Item, Org, Week level.
This report will be part of a new tab called Demand Fulfillment in the Supply Chain
Analyst Dashboard.
• Order Priority
• Order Number
• Line Number
• Requested Date
• Suggested Due Date
• Need By Date
• Days Late
• Order Qty
• Firm Date
• Firm Qty
• Source Org
The dimensional attributes of these measures will be:
• Item
• Organization
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• Order Type
• Source Supplier
• Source Supplier Site
• Customer
• Customer Site
A new report called “Order Details” will be made available as a detail report with
contextual drilldown from the Build Plan.
Starting in Release 12.2.4, DRP plans can be archived to APCC at the time of plan run,
similar to ASCP plans. The DRP plan option “Calculate Key Performance Indicators”
will now be used to determine whether to trigger archival of DRP plan during its plan
run.
If this is set to Yes, then after the plan run, archive plan summary will be automatically
launched for that plan.
In addition, when a DRP plan is launched, users will have the option to keep the previous
version of the plan archive around (for comparison purposes) or overwrite the previous
version with the current version. This is done using the new plan launch parameter
“Archive Current Version of Plan Summary,” similar to ASCP Plans. The default value
for this parameter is No.
A new dashboard, Trade Analyst Dashboard, contains reports and graphs for analyzing
promotion effectiveness, promotion performance, top and bottom performers, promotion
detail and lift decomposition.
Aggregate Promotion measures are available in the Answers area of the Real Time
S&OP dashboard.
Measure Definition
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% Spend Planned Planned promotional spending as a percentage of
promotional sales. This is a snapshot of the planned value
before the promotion was run. It is used to compare to the
actual results once the promotion is completed.
Base Event Value Base sales during the promotion. This represents the sales
that would occur even if the promotion was not run.
Base Event Value Planned Planned base sales during the promotion. This represents
the sales that would occur even if the promotion was not
run. This is a snapshot of the planned value before the
promotion was run. It is used to compare to the actual
results once the promotion is completed.
Base Event Volume Base volume during the promotion. This represents the
volume that would occur even if the promotion was not
run. This is a snapshot of the planned value before the
promotion was run. It is used to compare to the actual
results once the promotion is completed.
Base Value The sales that would occur in the absence of any
promotional activity.
Base Volume The volume that would occur in the absence of any
promotional activity.
Buydown $ The variable portion of the cost for the promotion. This is
the promotional spending that is based on the amount of
volume sold during the promotion.
CPIU Planned Planned Cost Per Incremental Unit. The planned total cost
of the promotion divided by the planned incremental
volume resulting from the promotion. This is a snapshot
of the planned value before the promotion was run. It is
used to compare to the actual results once the promotion
is completed.
Event Spend Planned Planned total cost of the promotion. Includes variable
(buydown) and fixed costs. This is a snapshot of the
planned value before the promotion was run. It is used to
compare to the actual results once the promotion is
completed.
Fixed Cost The fixed portion of the cost for the promotion. This is the
promotional spending that does not vary based on the
amount of volume sold during the promotion. This is
typically the vehicle cost for the promotion.
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Incremental Event Value Incremental sales resulting from the promotion. These are
the sales above base that are generated by the promotion.
Incremental Event Value Planned incremental sales resulting from the promotion.
Planned These are the planned sales above base that are generated
by the promotion. This is a snapshot of the planned value
before the promotion was run. It is used to compare to the
actual results once the promotion is completed.
Incremental Event Volume Incremental volume resulting from the promotion. This is
the volume above base that is generated by the promotion.
List Price The regular price that the manufacturer charges for the
product.
Manufacturer List Price The regular price that the manufacturer charges for the
product.
Price Decrease Level The percentage decrease from regular retail price to
promoted retail price represented in 5% increments.
Calculated as: ((Regular Price – Promoted Price) /
Promoted Price)) * 100 rounded to nearest 5%.
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Price Discount Percentage The percentage decrease from regular retail price to
promoted retail price. Calculated as: ( (Regular Price –
Promoted Price) / Promoted Price) * 100.
Regular Non-Promoted The regular retail price for the product when there is no
Price promotion running; dimensioned by Promotion.
Regular Price The regular retail price for the product when there is no
promotion running.
Total Event Value Total sales of the promotion. Includes base and
incremental sales.
Total Event Value Planned Planned total sales of the promotion. Includes base and
incremental sales. This is a snapshot of the planned value
before the promotion was run. It is used to compare to the
actual results once the promotion is completed.
Total Event Volume Total volume of the promotion. Includes base and
incremental volume.
Total Event Volume Planned total volume of the promotion. Includes base and
Planned incremental volume. This is a snapshot of the planned
value before the promotion was run. It is used to compare
to the actual results once the promotion is completed.
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planning attributes (for example, customer order hold status.) This allows you see in a
single place both planning and execution information about supply chain orders.
The following seeded reports will now support a page prompt so that users can select a
calendar:
• Aggregate Horizontal Plan
• Detailed Horizontal Plan
In these reports, bucketing defaults to the default calendar based on the profile (current
behavior), but you can change to a different calendar using a drop down menu at the top.
A new item filter has also been added to the new material plan to support further drill
down to one or more items.
In Release VCP 12.2.5.1, a new Project Driven Supply Chain dashboard is available in
Advanced Planning Command Center (APCC) to further facilitate the process of
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collaboration between project managers and supply chain planners and help maximize on
time delivery and minimize supply costs for companies that deal with large scale
projects.
Project Performance Summary: A tabular view of key project level supply chain
performance information such as the on-time delivery status of the project, the number of
days late, the total number of orders and the number of orders that are late for each
project. From this view, planners can drill down to see supply and demand summaries by
order type and also see the individual orders.
Top N Late Demands Ordered by Value: A list of the top N project specific demands that
are late. The order with the highest order value shows up first in the list. From a demand
in this list, planners can drill down to the ASCP Supplies and Demands screen to see the
pegged supplies and also evaluate the critical supplies that are causing the demand to be
delayed.
Top N Late Purchase Orders (By Days Late): A list of the top N purchase orders pegged
to project demands that are late (relative to their Need by Date). The list is ordered by
Days Late with the purchase orders that is most delayed showing in the first row.
Resource Utilization Summary: A summary view of the resources that are most utilized
in the ASCP plan with the resource that has the maximum resource utilization showing
on the top of the list. Note that the resource utilization is not filtered by the project; it is
the total resource utilization across all project and non project supplies planned on that
resource.
A new report has been added to display planned purchases by manufacturing period:
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The report has the following dimensions and facts: Plan and time as dimensions,
purchasing cost as fact. The report is filtered to include the baseline and comparison
plans.
A new report has been added to show a summary view of days of cover:
The report has the following dimensions and facts: Plan, Organization, Item as
dimensions, on hand days of cover as a fact. The report is filtered to include the baseline
and comparison plans.
The report has the following dimensions and facts: plan, supplier, organization,
manufacturing period, and order type as dimensions, order quantity as fact. The report is
filtered to only include order types of purchase order, purchase requisition, and planned
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orders where supplier is not null. Orders with supplier unassigned are also filtered out.
The report is filtered to include the baseline and comparison plans.
The report has the following dimensions and facts: Plan, organization, resource
description, and manufacturing period as dimensions, resource utilization % - total as a
fact. The report is filtered to include the baseline and comparison plans.
The report has the following dimensions and facts: Plan, organization, category
description, and manufacturing period as dimensions, production plan as a fact.
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Plan Health Summary Re-Layout
The Plan Health Summary tab has been re-arranged to add new content, remove content
duplicated on other tabs, and to better utilize the page.
The Demand and Supply tab has been re-arranged to add new content, remove content
duplicated on other tabs, and to better utilize the page.
The Resources tab has been re-arranged to add new content, remove content duplicated
on other tabs, and to better utilize the page.
Where possible, links that take users from reports in APCC to detailed views in the
Advanced Supply Chain Planning Planner Workbench have been updated to point to the
ADF versions of those views.
Plan Estimation: The Plan Estimation Analytic displays the performance of the Policy
Plan and compares it with Targets. It displays, by Category, the Target Service Level
(%) which is specified as an input to Oracle Inventory Optimization (IO) through the
Policy Parameter Set, the Estimated Service Level (%) which is calculated based on
inventory levels within the SPP Policy Plan, the Estimated Stock, which is an
average value of the average expected inventory, and the Uncovered Demand and
Uncovered Variance, which are measures of the extent to which the forecasted
demand and its variance may not be covered through projected inventory values. You
can drill down from this Analytic to view data by Item, Organization and across
time.
Policy Execution: The “Policy Execution” analytic is a view into the current execution
details associated with the Policy Plan. It displays, by Category, the On-Hand,
Scheduled Receipts and Planned Orders from the Plan. You can drill from this
Analytic to view data by Item, Organization and across time.
Policy Monitoring: The “Policy Monitoring” analytic provides visibility into how Policy
Plan targets and current Plan results compare with historical metrics. The analytic
displays Estimated Service Level (%) and Estimated Stock as derived from the Plan,
the input Target Fill Rate (%) and Target Stock (corresponding to the Target Fill
Rate (%), and the Actual Fill Rate (%) and Actual Stock. The Actual Fill Rate (%) is
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calculated using historical shipment data which can be collected from EBS Order
Management or loaded through legacy loads. The Actual Stock shows the current on-
hand availability.
Besides the Analytics described above, the new Policy Planning Dashboard has a
selector region at the page level that enables selection of the Scenario, the Organization
and the date range to view analytics. Another region has links to enable viewing, creating
and launching SPP and IO Plans, as well as managing Policy Parameter Set and Item
Simulation set data.
3.2.3.2. Support for creating APCC scenarios with multiple SPP Plans
A Policy Planning setup could consist of multiple SPP Plans. To analyze data from
multiple plans together in the Policy Planning dashboard, they can be grouped into a
scenario within APCC. The scenario can be associated with the Policy Planning
dashboard by setting the “Analyze In” value to “Service Parts Planning”
3.2.3.3. New Profile Option to specify Category Set for Policy Planning dashboard
A new profile called “MSC: Category Set for Policy Planning APCC Reports” has been
introduced. The categories for which data is shown in the Policy Planning dashboard are
derived from this category set. The Category Set value in this profile must be set to the
same Category Set that is used to define Policy Parameters in the Policy Parameters Set.
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• Use the updated dates in ASCP interactive planning calculations to calculate the
impact of transportation delays on downstream orders and take corrective action
With this release, ASCP respects Oracle Process Manufacturing standard and max delays
between routings. This allows you to cap the maximum time duration between upstream
and downstream make supplies and enforce contiguous processing. You can also enforce
a minimum (standard) delay between make supplies in order to accurately reflect
processing constraints such as cool-down periods.
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3.3.1.5. Distribution Planning Scalability Enhancements
Distribution enterprises often need to manage large numbers of locations and items: the
number of locations may be in the thousands; the number of items at each location may
be in the tens of thousands or more. Planning in such an environment requires a focus on
scalability.
In conjunction with the above change, the load consolidation phase of Distribution
Planning has been decoupled from the demand push-down and supply allocation phase
mentioned above and is now also done concurrently in a multi-process fashion.
Functionally, this may reduce how well Distribution Planning is able to consolidate loads
relative to its base behavior in Release 12, because the consolidation calculations in
downstream supply chain layers now no longer factor in the consolidation outputs from
upstream layers. This is a trade-off that the user optionally makes for the sake of better
performance.
When searching for end-item substitute supplies, ASCP can optionally search for them in
ascending order of substitution relationship date effectivity. This provides a mechanism
for dictating the item order of ASCP's search for end-item substitutes.
This capability is not supported for R12.0.x source instances. It is supported for R12.1.1
and 11i10 source instances.
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allows ASCP plans to remain consistent with short-term scheduling decisions made in
PS.
A new custom row in the horizontal plan allows a user to display a custom order type
(for example, Projected Available Balance Dollar Value) and label it appropriately. The
custom row can be selectively displayed, by user or by preference. The logic to calculate
custom order type data values must be provided by the user via a custom PL/SQL
program unit that is pointed to by the profile option MSC: Horizontal Plan Extension
Program. The same mechanism can be used to customize data values in standard rows of
the horizontal plan.
ASCP supports the concept of supply tolerancing through Shortage Tolerance and
Excess Tolerance Percent pegging controls that dictate when demands and supplies are
considered to be fully pegged. In the example with the 9,950 pound coil above, ASCP
will still generate a recommendation for an extra 10,000 pound coil to cover the supply
deficit, but will peg that supply to excess so that it is moved to the end of the planning
horizon. This prevents the planner from accidentally releasing unneeded work to the
production floor.
Supply tolerancing support where Shortage and Excess Tolerance Percentages are input
as global profile option values is existing capability. New with this release is the ability
for the user to optionally specify Shortage and Excess Tolerance Percentages (via
customization) at the item-organization level in the staging table
MSC_ST_SYSTEM_ITEMS. If these values are populated, ASCP will look at these
staging table values in lieu of the profile option values.
Also new is ASCP's ability to delay the satisfaction of 'small' demands until sufficient
outstanding demand has accumulated to warrant the production of a standard-sized batch.
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'Small' is defined to be a percentage of the Fixed Lot Multiple order modifier. This
percentage can be entered (via customization) in the planner server table
MSC_SYSTEM_ITEMS.
Supply Tolerancing requires the use of Constrained with Detailed Scheduling plans.
• To enable phasing out of item components and their replacement with newer
ingredients, it is required that there be no new order or build for the phased out
item. The existing supply of the phased out item is to be used up.
• No new supplies for certain products are to be made, but available stock can be
distributed and sold.
This feature is only available in the Constrained (Without Scheduling) planning mode. It
is not available in the Unconstrained, Constrained (Classic), Constrained (Classic) With
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Decision Rules and Optimized (Classic), and Constrained (With Scheduling) planning
modes. It is also not available in Distribution Planning.
With this (optional) feature, ASCP would match the Monday purchase order to the
Friday demand and recommend the cancellation of the Thursday purchase order. Use of
existing purchase order supplies in this chronological fashion applies across substitute
components: if the Monday and Thursday purchase orders in our example are in fact
different items but substitute components, ASCP would still consume the Monday
purchase order and cancel the Thursday purchase order.
This feature is useful for minimizing the impact of purchase order change
recommendations on suppliers.
In this release a new profile option “MSC: Forecast Spreading Calendar” enables users
to spread forecasts based on the shipping calendar in addition to the manufacturing
calendar. The list of values for this profile option includes:
Organization Manufacturing Calendar – This is the default value. The system will use
the organization manufacturing calendar for spreading the forecast.
Organization Shipping Calendar – The system will use the organization shipping
calendar for spreading the forecast.
Note – A forecast for a non-working day in the manufacturing calendar is moved to the
previous working day.
Example: Consider an organization with a manufacturing calendar that has both Saturday
and Sunday as non-working days. On the other hand the shipping calendar has only
Sunday as the only non-working day of the week. Based on the shipping calendar, a
forecast of 480 units for period 3 (March) is spread evenly to daily buckets from Monday
to Saturday (total of 24 buckets). That results in the daily forecast quantity of 20
(480 / 24 = 20). Since Saturday is not a working day based on the manufacturing
calendar, therefore ASCP moves and adds up the Saturdays’ forecasts to Fridays’
forecasts (20 + 20 = 40). The result is shown in the following table:
Date 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Forecast 20 20 20 20 40 0
Date 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Forecast 20 20 20 20 40 0
Date 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
Forecast 20 20 20 20 40 0
Date 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Forecast 20 20 20 20 40 0
With this release ASCP provides a profile option called “MSC: Apply shortage and
excess tolerance percentages to planned orders”. The list of values for this profile option
includes:
Yes – The shortage tolerance and excess percentages are applied to all supplies including
planned orders. This is the default value.
No – The shortage tolerance and excess percentages are applied only to existing supplies
(such as On Hand, WIP).
When this profile option is set to No, it allows ASCP to generate planned orders that
satisfy 100% of demand, while matching existing supplies (which may have irregular
quantities due to actual process yields) to demands using a supply tolerance.
If the profile option “MSC: Apply shortage and excess tolerance percentages to planned
orders” is set to “No”, ASCP creates 6 planned orders of 2000 to satisfy Demand1 of
10200. In this case Demand1 is satisfied completely and the excess of 1800 (12000 –
10200) is used to satisfy Demand2 ignoring the excess tolerance percent even though
1800 < 1836.
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On the other hand, if the profile option is set to “Yes”, then ASCP initially creates 6
planned orders to satisfy Demand1, but it uses (pegs) only 5 of those to satisfy this
demand since (10200 – 10000) < 204. In this case Demand1 is satisfied with an allowed
shortage of 200. The other planned order of 2000 is used for satisfying Demand2.
Supply Tolerancing requires the use of Constrained with Detailed Scheduling plans.
Yes – ASCP uses the existing supply of primary components before substitute
components. This is the default value.
If this profile option is set to “No”, and there is no existing supply for substitute
components, ASCP generates new planned orders for the primary components before
substitute components.
In addition to the above profile option, you need to set the following 2 profile options to
use this feature:
This profile option allows you to control how the existing supplies in substitute
components / alternate BOM paths are used by ASCP. You need to set the value of this
profile option to 0 (consider both existing substitute component supplies and existing
alternate BOM component supplies) or 1 (consider existing substitute component
supplies but not existing alternate BOM component supplies) to use this enhancement.
Values 2 (consider neither existing substitute component supplies nor existing alternate
BOM component supplies) and 3 (consider existing alternate BOM component supplies
but not existing substitute component supplies) are not compatible with this feature.
This profile option enables ASCP to plan supplies with respect to the timing of
alternates’ usage. You need to set the value of this profile option to “No” to use this
feature.
With the feature turned off (MSO: Use up existing supply of primary components before
substitute = Yes):
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With the feature turned on (MSO: Use up existing supply of primary components before
substitute = No):
Note that the on hand of a substitute component will not be used if it is less than the
Minimum Order Quantity, Fixed Order Quantity, or Fixed Lot Multiplier. The on hand
of a substitute component may be partially used if it is greater than the order modifiers
but it is not a multiple of them.
This enhancement is only available with the Constrained (Without Scheduling) planning
mode.
• While exploding forecasts of ATO Models, ASCP traces the exploded forecasts
of option classes and options to the top model forecast that is the source of the
original demand. This information is used for reporting and analysis in
Advanced Planning Command Center.
• The forecast explosion process will now be able to use the Planning percentages
from Demantra Demand Management (if published). If the planning percentages
from Demantra are not available, the explosion will use the usages on the Bills
of Material as the default.
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These features are valid for local and global forecasts and also in both simple, single-
organization models and multi-level, multi-organization models.
Both these enhancements are available only when the plan option 'Explode Forecast' is
turned on and the forecast control for the Options and Option Classes is set to Consume
and Derive.
The Collections process has been enhanced to collect new entities that allow ASCP to
better support asset intensive planning - Asset and Activity items, Sub-inventory default
locator statuses, EAM Budget Forecast, EAM Production Work Orders, Repair Bill of
Materials / Routings (defined in EAM), CMRO Unit Maintenance Plan, CMRO
Production Work Orders, CMRO Reservations, CMRO Outside Processing Supplies /
Demands.
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3.3.4.6. Respect CMRO Reservations
In CMRO, it is possible to reserve on hand supply, work order supply or internal
requisition supply to a downstream work order demand. ASCP collects these reservations
and will respect them when making planning decisions.
• Operating Fleet: The name of the operating fleet to which the asset is assigned to
(CMRO Only)
• Maintenance Plan: The name of the maintenance plan that is the source of this
maintenance work order
• Visit: The name of the visit to which this maintenance work order is associated
with (CMRO Only)
• Produce to Stock: Value of “Yes” indicates that the maintenance work order
produces supply. Typically these are maintenance work orders created for repair.
Value of “No” indicates that the maintenance work order does not create
supplies
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• Part Condition: “Usable” or “Defective” depending on the type of supply
• Activity Type: The type of activity. Activities of type “Rebuild” are considered
by ASCP to represent the repair process (EAM Only)
• Asset Group: The group to which the asset belongs to (EAM Only)
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3.3.4.13. Integration to Rapid Planning
With this integration, it is possible to use Rapid Planning to perform simulations on top
of a supply chain plan created using Advanced Supply Chain Planning. You can continue
to use ASCP as your daily or weekly planning engine and use Rapid Planning for intra-
day or intra-week simulations of changes to your business such as changes to demands /
supplies and capacities. Users will be able to create a baseline Rapid Planning plan that
mirrors the ASCP plan on which they want to perform simulations on through a copy
process that copies demands and supplies into Rapid Planning from a reference ASCP
plan. Users can then specify changes to the plan inputs such as new or changed
demands/supplies/capacity. Before running a Rapid Planning simulation with these
changed inputs, users can also specify what portion of the baseline ASCP plan output
should be considered frozen (and thereby not allowed to be changed by the Rapid
Planning simulation process). The results of the Rapid Planning simulation can be
released to the source systems and/or fed into the next ASCP plan run as firm planned
orders. Users can also compare the extent to which the simulation has changed the
baseline ASCP plan through the plan analysis and order comparison capabilities within
Rapid Planning.
The new Material Plan displays demand and supply for the selected items in a bucketed
fashion including the totals. The Material Plan allows in-place editing. You can update
demand quantities (“forecasts”, “manual demands”) and supply quantities (“planned
orders”). Changes to the bucketed values are allocated down using a proportional rule
and the underlying planned orders will be firmed.
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Key features of the new Material Plan are:
• User-defined layouts
• Page filters of Organization, Category Set, Category
• Ability to hide/show totals for selected items/categories
• Color coding to highlight editable cells and user edits
You can access the new Material Plan from the ASCP Planner Workbench within the
Navigator Tree – both from Plans (Category/Item Nodes) and Queries (results of Item
Query).
The new Resource Plan can be accessed from the ASCP Planner Workbench within the
Navigator Tree – both from Plans (Department/Resource Nodes) and Queries (results of
Resource Query).
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category sets at the same time. This enables analyses such as, “All supplies of
wafers by wafer type and by package/pin type going into different integrated
circuit categories (finished goods),” which is a powerful tool to analyze complex
BOM fan-outs, etc.
• User-defined filters for export. The filters can be attributes of an Item, End Item
or Order.
• User-defined columns for export. The columns can be of an Item, End Item,
Order or an End Demand
• Visibility to up/down stream supply chain information by enabling the pegging
links in the export.
You can create these Excel Worksheets using a new setup menu called Define
Worksheets:
Multiple worksheets may be associated to a plan using the Reporting tab in ASCP Plan
options. This enables these named worksheets to be pre-built after every plan run so that
you can have them ready to be opened whenever needed.
You can access these worksheets from the ASCP Planner Workbench using the “Export
to Excel” option under the Tools menu. For APCC users, these worksheets are also
accessible from the Supply Chain Analyst Dashboard using the “Worksheets” link in
ASCP Plan Actions under the Plan Health Summary and Demand and Supply Tabs.
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The profile option values are:
Yes ASCP builds early to consume existing supplies before they become
obsolete. This is the default value.
Even if the profile option is set to “No”, ASCP’s optimization phase may still elect to
build early if that is the only way to satisfy demand on time given capacity constraints.
You need to use the Item Attributes Mass Maintenance window to specify the post-
processing lead time for make items.
Note – The Post-processing lead time is defaulted to zero in the Master Item and
Organization Item windows for make items and cannot be modified in the source.
ASCP populates the date representing the point in time between the end of the last real
operation and the post processing step into the existing Suggested Dock Date field.
In case of Enforce Demand Due Date plans, the lead time may be compressed to satisfy
the demand on time. The order of compression is from left to right (starts with pre-
processing lead time and ends with post-processing lead time.)
You can specify a user-defined calendar for each planned organization in the
Organizations tab of the Plan Options window. The Forecast Spreading Calendar
specified in the Organizations tab overrides the forecast spreading calendar option
(Manufacturing Calendar or Shipping Calendar) that is specified via the profile option
MSC: Forecast Spreading Calendar.
Large enterprises have large volumes of forecasted maintenance work orders. For supply
chain planning purposes, consolidating these work orders into monthly aggregate work
orders allows their material and resource requirements to be planned for much more
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efficiently, without compromising plan quality. Such aggregation of EAM and CMRO
forecasted maintenance work orders is now done automatically by Collections. EAM
forecast work orders are aggregated by Item, Org, Month, Maintenance Plan, Asset
Group, and Class Code. CMRO forecast work orders are aggregated by Item, Org,
Month, Maintenance Plan, Maintenance Requirement, and Operating Fleet.
Beyond the Collections process, within the ASCP plan run itself, you can optionally
further aggregate maintenance work orders for even greater computational savings. You
can aggregate actual maintenance work orders, not just forecasted maintenance work
orders. You can drop Asset Group and Class Code distinctions between EAM work
orders, resulting in further work order consolidation. Similarly, you can drop
Maintenance Requirement and Operating Fleet distinctions between CMRO work orders.
With Release 12.1.3.9, the critical path computation has been extended to include late
demands in Enforce Demand Due Date plans. Demands can be satisfied late in Enforce
Demand Due Date plans if the profile option MSO: Lead Time Control is set to “Do Not
Violate minimum processing time”. Since EDD plans do not constrain by resource and
supplier capacity, the critical path will indicate the longest lead time path in the pegging
chain between the lowest level components/ingredients and the finished product supply.
Planners can view the critical path details both in the Critical Activities screen as well as
in the Gantt chart. The navigational details and information displayed are the same as in
Enforce Capacity Constraints plans with the addition of three new attributes in the
Critical Activities window, namely: Unconstrained Latest Possible Completion Time,
Unconstrained Earliest Possible Completion Time and Days Late (Unconstrained). The
Days Late (Unconstrained) is the difference between the supply due date and the
Unconstrained Latest Possible Completion Time.
3.3.4.22. Profile Option to Enable Post-processing Lead Time for Make Orders
In this release you can instruct Advanced Supply Chain Planning whether to include the
post-processing lead time when planning for make orders. This is achieved by using the
following new profile option:
MSC: Include postprocessing lead time when planning for make orders
Profile Description
Value
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3.3.4.23. Minimum Remaining Shelf Life for Forecasts
Products such as groceries and pharmaceuticals have limited shelf lives. Customers of
such products typically impose rules that dictate that when such products arrive at the
customer site, they must have a certain minimum duration of remaining shelf life, so that
there will be enough time for the end consumer to buy and use the products.
ASCP now supports minimum remaining shelf life (MRSL) constraints specified at the
item-organization, and item-customer site levels for forecasts in addition to sales orders.
Item-organization and item-customer site level MRSLs are specified via item attribute
simulation sets. Additionally MRSL can be specified at the sales order level. Sales order-
level MRSLs can only be entered via customization that populates a new column in the
MSC_SALES_ORDERS table on the planning server.
• When using priority pegging, Supply Window Size and Demand Window Size
should be set to 1.
• The profile option “MSO: Net All Firm Supplies Before Creating Planned Order” is
not honored when ASCP plans with respect to MRSL.
• During the demand / supply netting process, ASCP assumes that the shelf life of an
item is much larger than the minimum remaining shelf life of demands for this item.
• MRSL and safety stock planning cannot be enabled for the same item. If an item has
demands with MRSL requirements, safety stock for that item will not be planned.
o Alternate sourcing decisions will not take MRSL into account. MRSL of on
hand inventory in different source orgs will not be considered when making
sourcing decisions at the destination organization.
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1. Parallel Collections – One Source, Multiple VCP Instances on One Shared
Physical Destination Server
You can now execute multiple runs of Collections from the same physical
destination server in parallel. All of the data are pulled from the same EBS source
instance into the single physical destination planning server. For example, in one run
you may pull data for Items and Sales Orders for organizations M1 and M2 and in
another parallel run you may pull data for the same entities for organizations M3and
M4. It is recommended that the set of organizations associated with each planning
instance to be mutually exclusive.
The efficiency of the parallel Collections runs is enhanced by the following source
instance profile option:
If a Collections run starts and the ages of the Collections materialized views on the
source for the entities to be collected are both consistent and less than the value of
this profile option, then the Refresh Collections Snapshots portion of Collections
processing will be skipped and Collections will run faster overall.
The default value for this profile option is “NULL”. This means that Refresh
Collections Snapshots runs with each Collections run.
In order to perform Parallel Collections, the System Administrator must remove the
following incompatibilities:
Concurrent Program Incompatibility Source / Destination
Refresh Collection Refresh Collection Source
Snapshots Snapshots
Request Set Planning Data Request Set Planning Data Destination
Collection Collection
2. Parallel Collections – One Source, Multiple VCP Instances Each on Its Own
Physical Destination Server
Volumes and performance requirements may dictate that for at least some of the
VCP planning instances, each must be housed in its own physical destination server.
By manually removing the seeded incompatibilities, you can now also run multiple
parallel Collections from different physical destination servers, with each
Collections run pulling data from a single shared source EBS instance.
The parallel runs are controlled by the same profile option mentioned above:
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In previous releases, there was a seeded Concurrent Request incompatibility between
Collections and Plan Run (specifically, between ODS Load and Memory Based
Snapshot.) This was put in place to avoid the possibility of Collections overwriting
data that is in the process of being read in for the Plan Run.
With this release, in order to support the “multiple VCP planning instances on one
shared physical destination server” configuration, this incompatibility has been
removed. This allows a plan to be run in one VCP planning instance while
Collections is running in another VCP planning instance (on the same physical
destination server.)
The ODS Load program will error out if the Memory Based Snapshot program does
not finish within the user-specified wait time. Similarly the Memory Based Snapshot
program will error out if the ODS Load program does not finish within the user-
specified wait time.
The default value for the profile option is “NULL”. This means the Memory Based
Snapshot will wait for the ODS Load or vice versa indefinitely.
This enhancement allows you to include collection of supplementary legacy file data
just by launching Standard Collections, without having to launch two separate
Collections processes (Standard Collections and Legacy Collections.)
Specifically you can load data for Forecasts, MPS, and MDS via flat files in line
with loading other entities using Standard Collections.
There are 3 profile options that are used with this feature:
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MSC: Enable Parallel Legacy Collections – The profile option values are:
Yes: You can use this feature when the value of this profile option is set to “Yes”. In
this case the system displays the following additional values for the collection
entities Forecasts, MPS, and MDS:
• Legacy Pre-Staged
When the “Legacy Flat File” value is selected, you need to use the following profile
option to specify a legacy flat file directory which contains your legacy flat files:
You need to select the “Legacy Pre-Staged” value when your Forecasts, MPS, and
MDS data are loaded to staging tables already.
You also need to specify the path to the “$MSC_TOP” directory which is used to
locate the control files used by MSCLDM to load data into the staging tables. This is
accomplished by using the following profile option:
In order to use "Legacy Collections Running In Line with Standard Collections", the
system administrator must manually remove the following incompatibilities:
Concurrent Program Incompatibility Source / Destination
Request Set Planning Data Pre-Process Monitor Destination
Collection
Request Set Planning Data Flat File Loader Destination
Collection
With this enhancement, the existing profile option “MSC: Purchase Order Dock Date
Calculation Preference” does not affect supplier capacity consumption. The two choices,
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Promise Date and Need by Date, only determine which date is selected from the
purchase order to use within planning as the suggested dock date.
The new profile option “MSC: Supplier Capacity Consumption by Purchase Orders” has
four settings. You can select “Yes” and all purchase orders consume supplier capacity or
“No Consumption” (default) and then no purchase orders consume supplier capacity. If
you select “Unacknowledged Purchase Orders Only” then this behavior is similar to
current behavior where purchase orders without a promise date consume supplier
capacity.
The newest choice is “Purchase Orders outside Lead Time Only”. With this choice,
ASCP does not consume supplier capacity with any purchase order which has a dock
date inside of the item or supplier-item lead time. If the purchase order dock date is
outside of lead time, then the purchase order consumes supplier capacity. Users can set
supplier capacity to accumulate at lead time and only purchase orders outside of lead
time consume supplier capacity. The supplier capacity horizontal plan is enhanced to
display the supplier capacity consumption based on the new profile option.
A new window called Exception Group allows you to select specific exceptions from a
list of available exceptions. You can save the Exception Group and attach it to plans
using a new plan option field. When the plan is run, ASCP generates only the exceptions
listed in the Exception Group.
The Exception Group allows you to further limit the number of exceptions generated by
restricting the generated exceptions to only selected
• Organizations
• Item Categories
and to those with dates within a specified
• Exception Time Fence (Days)
You can access the new Orders screen from the Supply/Demand Pegging Tree, the Items
view, and the Sources view. The Orders screen is populated with context from the
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selection in the invoking view. This gives you different ways to find key orders and
efficiently view, edit and release them.
You can access the new Item Simulation Set screen from the Items, Supply/Demand,
Sources and Orders views. The Item Simulation Set screen is populated with context
from the selection in the invoking view. This gives you different ways to find key items
and efficiently change their planning attributes for simulation purposes.
In Release 12.2.4, Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning will support the notion of
regular and premium capacity for a given production resource. Users can specify a
premium capacity percentage at the Resource level. Premium Capacity is calculated by
multiplying the regular capacity (in hours) by the premium capacity percentage value.
For example if the regular capacity is 16 hours per day and the premium capacity
percentage is 20%, the premium capacity is assumed to be 3.2 hours. This feature is only
supported in constrained plans with the Constrained Mode set to “Constrained without
Detailed Scheduling”.
Advanced Supply Chain Planning will first use all of the available regular capacity when
planning supplies to satisfy demands on time. Once the use of regular capacity has been
maximized, ASCP will attempt to use premium capacity to satisfy demands on time.
When the use of regular and premium capacity is still not sufficient to satisfy demands
on time, demands will be satisfied late and in each successive planning time bucket after
the demand due date, the use of regular capacity will be maximized before using
premium capacity. ASCP will also first search for regular capacity availability across
alternate sources, alternate routings and alternate resources before resorting to the use of
premium capacity.
Exception messages will be generated for those Resource / planning time bucket
combinations in which premium capacity is used. Planners will be able to identify
instances where the premium capacity has been used but total capacity (regular plus
premium) is not exceeded and other instances where the total capacity is also exceeded.
Information on regular and premium capacity availability and usage is exported to
Advanced Planning Command Center as part of the Archive Plan process.
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In Release 12.2.4, Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning will account for Warehouse
Capacity constraints in the planning process. Planners can instruct the planning process
(through plan option setting) to consider these constraints at the Organization level or at
Category-Organization level. The Category in this case refers to a “storage category”
such as Frozen, Refrigerated or Dry storage. The Organization level warehouse capacity
is a setting within the EBS Inventory Organization parameters form and the
Organization-Category level capacity can be specified in the Storage Capacity form in
the planning instance. This feature is available only in constrained plans with the
Constrained Mode set to “Constrained without Detailed Scheduling”
Advanced Supply Chain Planning will apply the warehouse capacity constraint to the
sum of {Projected Available Balance * item unit volume} across all items in an
organization or organization-category (depending on the level at which the warehouse
capacity is specified). In doing so, ASCP will often need to plan shipment of items from
upstream locations (Plants) to downstream locations (Distribution Centers) ahead of
when these shipments are required to satisfy the demands at the downstream locations.
When performing this “pull ahead” of shipments to address the warehouse capacity
constraints, ASCP will attempt to minimize the overall excess inventory in the supply
chain. When required to choose between different items to pull ahead, ASCP will pick
items that have the highest (unit volume / standard cost) ratio. This choice will maximize
impact on reducing warehouse capacity consumption at the locations with the constraints
and minimize the impact on increasing inventory cost in the supply chain.
Planners will be able to view the details of warehouse capacity consumption at the Item,
Category and Organization levels in the Material Plan user interface. The information
will be presented both in terms of absolute value (the volume used) and the percentage
value (the percentage of available warehouse capacity used). ASCP will also generate
exception messages for instances where the warehouse capacity was violated.
Information on warehouse capacity availability and consumption is exported to
Advanced Planning Command Center as part of the Archive Plan process.
These enhancements are available for the plan Constraints Mode of “Constrained
(Without Detailed Scheduling).”
MRSL Support for Multi Echelon Supply Chain – Before this enhancement, ASCP
did not consider the expiration dates of on hand lots that are moved to an in-transit
status. The in-transit supply was assumed to have “full” shelf life remaining starting
from the due date of the supply at the destination organization.
With Release 12.2.4, supplies expiry dates are determined based on the following rules:
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1. All supplies expiry dates in the source organization are based on the item/org shelf
life specified in the source organization (Item/Lot Expiry Date in the source org).
2. All supplies expiry dates in the destination organization are based on the item/org
shelf life specified in the destination organization (Item/Lot Expiry Date in the
destination org). Note that if there is no shelf life defined in the destination org, the
planning engine considers infinite shelf life.
3. All in-transit supplies expiry dates from the source organization to the destination
organization are based on the item/org shelf life of the item in the destination
organization.
With respect to these rules, there is no collection or snapshot impact for this
enhancement in Release 12.2.4.
You can specify the Safety Stock MRSL at the Item-Org level in the Item Attributes
Mass Maintenance (IMM) window. This is accomplished via a new field called “Safety
Stock MRSL.”
Ingredient Based MRSL – Before this enhancement, ASCP supported MRSL for the
end item based on the user specified value for the item. With this enhancement, user can
specify an ingredient in a formula (a component in a BOM) which its shelf life
determines the expiry date of the product. This ingredient is called MRSL ingredient.
Note – The MRSL ingredient is not necessarily in the final product formula. It could be
an ingredient of any intermediate ingredient that feeds the final product.
Example – Consider the final product P with 2 ingredients in its formula, I1 and IM1.
Ingredient IM1 is an Intermediate Ingredient with 2 ingredients in its formula, I2 and I3:
I1 I2
IM1 I3
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You can select any one of the four ingredients (I1, IM1, I2, or I3) as the MRSL
Ingredient for the Product P.
This is accomplished by using a new field in the Item Attributes Mass Maintenance
window at the Item-Org level called “MRSL Ingredient.” You can enter data manually or
upload an Excel spreadsheet to populate this field using the import capability of IMM.
Specifically ASCP enforces the Process Effective Start Dates with respect to all other
planning constraints. This enhancement is available for both EDD and ECC plan in the
plan modes “Constrained (With Detailed Scheduling)” and “Constrained (Classic).”
A new exception called “Process effective date range violated” is generated when
process effective date range constraints are not respected by the planning engine.
ASCP enforces the Process Effective Date Range constraints in conjunction with other
planning constraints. The order of respecting these constraints depends on the type of the
plan:
1. Firmed Dates
2. Demand Due Dates (Adjusted Demand Due Date when the profile option MSO:
Lead Time Control is set to Do Not Violate Minimum Processing Times)
Note – ASCP planning engine initially attempts to find a solution that respects PTF,
Current Date, and Effective Date Ranges. If a feasible solution cannot be found then
the planning engine may violate PTF, Current Date, or both in order to respect the
Effective Date Ranges.
7. Resource Constraints
Note – ASCP planning engine initially attempts to find a solution that respects
Resource Constraints and Effective Date Ranges. If a feasible solution cannot be
found then the planning engine may violate Resource Constraints in order to respect
the Effective Date Ranges.
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Order of constraints in ECC Plan
1. Firmed Dates
5. Resource Constraints
Note – ASCP planning engine initially attempts to find a solution that respects
Demand Due Dates and Effective Date Ranges. If a feasible solution cannot be found
then the planning engine may violate Demand Due Dates in order to respect the
Effective Date Ranges.
Note – The order of constraints in EDD plan is also applied to upstream orders of all
firm dates in ECC plan as well.
Note – The MRSL and Hard Link constraints are considered before the Process Effective
Date Range constraints. In other words, the Process Effective Date Ranges could be
violated due to MRSL or Hard Link constraints.
An important part of ensuring a tight collaboration between the project management arm
of the organization and the supply chain arm is to enable planning processes that go
across these two functions. In other words,
• Demands for items required by project activities, or items that represent contract
deliverables to end customers, need to be communicated to the supply chain planning
system from the project management system
• Supply availability dates for these items as determined by the supply chain planning
systems need to be communicated back to the project management system
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Project managers and planners create and maintain a work breakdown structure (WBS)
in Primavera P6. Activities at the lowest level in the WBS represent the set of activities
required to meet the deliverables of the project. Some of these activities have associated
material requirements. These material requirements need to be communicated to the
supply chain planning system as material demands associated with the project. Other
activities in the WBS may be present to track key end item deliverables. These end items
are often manufactured or procured in the supply chain. Demand for these end item
deliverables should also be communicated from the project plan to the supply chain
planning system. Demand for end item deliverables originating from Primavera P6
should also be reconciled against sales orders for these end item deliverables that may
exist in the Project accounting and execution system (like EBS Projects / Order
Management).
The supply chain planning process will plan for supplies to meet the project demands.
Constraints in the supply chain and the hard pegged vs. soft pegged nature of different
items will result in supplies being planned for different dates/quantities. This supply
information needs to be fed back to the Primavera P6 project plan. The project manager,
armed with visibility to the supply constraints can make appropriate project rescheduling
decisions.
This closed loop process will drive efficiency into the supply chain management and
project management processes, reduce inventory and supply chain costs and improve on
time fulfillment of project deliverables.
Distribution Planning now supports minimum remaining shelf life (MRSL) constraints
specified at the item-organization, and item-customer site levels for forecasts and sales
orders.
Item-organization and item-customer site level MRSLs are specified via item attribute
simulation sets. Additionally MRSL can be specified at the sales order level. Sales order-
level MRSLs can only be entered via customization that populates a new column in the
MSC_SALES_ORDERS table on the planning server. Item attribute simulation set
MRSL values are applied to customer specific forecasts.
During fair share allocation among competing customer demands, the supply MRSL
values are considered and supply with insufficient MRSL is not allocated to customer
demands.
• Distribution planning does not support shelf life enhancements with projects.
• MRSL and safety stock planning can be enabled for the same item.
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o Alternate sourcing decisions will take MRSL into account. MRSL of on
hand inventory in different source orgs will be considered when making
sourcing decisions at the destination organization.
When the plan option is checked, ASCP will pull ahead supplies to earlier time buckets
in order to maximize resource utilization. This will be done at the expense of building
inventory ahead of the demand dates. When making the decision to pre-build, ASCP will
respect any upstream supply chain constraints such as purchasing lead times and supplier
capacities. The front loading of resources will also be influenced by upstream and
downstream capacity constraints. For example if an upstream resource is the capacity
bottleneck, it may not be possible to fully front load a downstream resource, even if that
resource has available capacity. ASCP will also maximize the use of alternates in an
attempt to maximize resource utilization. For example, alternate resource capacity in
earlier time buckets will be utilized even if the primary resource has available capacity in
later time buckets to satisfy the demand on time. When performing the pull ahead of
supplies to maximize resource utilization, ASCP will prefer to pull in work orders first
before pulling in planned orders.
The following sections describe Collections behavior with respect to different type of
collections:
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Complete Refresh – The Collections process removes all previously collected data and
collects only the category sets specified in the Category Sets window. As a result only
the data for the specified category sets are available for the planning process.
Targeted Refresh – The Collections process removes all previously collected data for
all category sets except for the category sets specified in the Category Sets window.
Then the Targeted Refresh collection is done for the specified category sets. As a result
only the data for these category sets are available for the planning process.
Note – In the Targeted Refresh collection, the collection process is run for specific
entities. So when a new list of category sets (changed list) is specified for an instance,
the Targeted Refresh collection should be run for all entities. Otherwise the previously
collected data for the unwanted category sets are not wiped out. In addition the data
collected for the new category sets in the list will not include the data for all entities.
Net Change Refresh – The Collections process collects the “net change” data for the
category sets specified in the Category Sets window. The data for all other category sets
remain intact. As a result the data for all category sets are available for the planning
process.
Note- This type of collection is not recommended when a new list of category sets is
specified since there will be unwanted data of the old category sets and missing data of
the new category sets.
Note – ASCP uses the plan level values specified for the forecast processing options if
the Demand Schedules region values are NULL. This rule is also applied to the Global
Demand Schedules. This means the “Demand Schedules” and “Global Demand
Schedules” forecast processing plan options have priority over the “Main Tab” plan
options.
The new Supply Planning work area is completely configurable via user-defined page
layouts, and will have the following capabilities:
• View/Edit Plan Options
• View/Edit Supplies and Demands
• View/Edit Exception Summary and Details
• View/Edit Material Plan
• View Resource Plan
• View/Edit Personal Queries and Results including Plan Summary
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• View/Edit Item Simulation Sets
• Run Plan
Please refer to the individual sections below for details on each of the above pages.
The Forms-based Planner Workbench will still be accessible using the old navigation.
The Supplies and Demands view has been enhanced to include a pegging view in
addition to the existing flat table view. You can switch between supply pegging and
demand pegging views to show the relationships between supplies and demands.
In addition to the available pre-seeded table layouts, you can create your own custom
table layouts that define which supply and demand columns are visible and the order in
which the columns appear. This gives you the flexibility to have multiple layouts
tailored to business needs.
You can group Personal Queries into a custom list for easy access. The Personal Query
results view is now configurable. You can view a user-defined list of attributes based on
the query setup.
You can define a new type of Personal Query called Metrics. These queries are primarily
for analytics, and support viewing Plan Summary key performance indicators in
graphical format (line or bar graphs). You can create multiple metrics using different key
measures. Each metric can be viewed in an Infotile format (graphs in a tiled view with
multiple tiles) or standard format (graphs arranged in a grid like view).
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The new ASCP Plan Options screen can be used both to create a new plan by clicking on
the “Create Plan” link in the supply planning work area “ASCP Plans” tab, and to edit or
view the plan options for an existing plan by clicking on “Plan Options”.
The set of plan options available is the exact same as the set of plan options available
using the Forms-based Plan Options screen.
This approach provides you with the flexibility to either use the Exception details screen
or to bypass the screen and navigate directly to screens like Supplies and Demands that
provide an ability to take actions to solve the exception condition.
For example from viewing a summary of “Late Replenishments for Sales Orders” at the
Org, Item, Customer, Week level, you can directly drill down to the supplies and
demands view that shows all the late sales orders for the selected Org, Item, Customer,
Week combination and start taking corrective action such as expediting supplies or
adding capacity to improve on time demand satisfaction.
Sometimes, you will need to review the exception in more detail before taking such
action. For example, the exception “Sourcing Split Percentage Violated” may require
you to review the exception detail to understand the target split percentage between the
Rank 1 and Rank 2 suppliers and the planned percentage split suggested by ASCP. The
new Exceptions screen helps with this analysis.
The Exceptions screen includes a top search panel and a bottom results panel. The search
panel includes commonly used filter criteria such as Exception Type, Item, Category,
Org, Supplier and Customer among others. You can also navigate out from Exception
Details to other screens such as Material Plan, Supplies and Demands and Resource Plan
using the “Drill to” link in the screen.
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In Release 12.2.5, ASCP provides a single unified project netting approach and the
profile option MSC: Use Attribute Based Netting is retired. There are two new plan
options that will provide the appropriate project netting controls:
Use Common Supplies for Project Demands: This is a checkbox in the Main tab of
plan options. When checked, ASCP will be allowed to use common supplies (i.e.
supplies with no project or task association) to meet project demands. When this
checkbox is unchecked, ASCP will not use Common supplies to meet project demands.
When set to “For soft pegged items only”, ASCP will not apply any order modifiers for
hard pegged items.
When set to “At Reservation level”, ASCP will apply order modifiers at the Reservation
level specified in plan options. For example when the Reservation level is “Project” and
hard pegging level is “Project-Task”, order modifiers are applied at the Project level and
a planned order (sized according to the specified order modifiers) generated for Project 1
/ Task 1 could potentially peg to a demand of Project 1 / Task 2.
When set to “At Hard pegging level”, ASCP will apply order modifiers at the hard
pegging level specified in plan options. For example when the Reservation level is
“Project” and hard pegging level is “Project-Task”, order modifiers are applied at the
Project-Task level and a planned order (sized according to the specified order modifiers)
is generated for Project 1 / Task 1 to meet Project 1 / Task 1 demand and a separate
planned order (sized according to the specified order modifiers) is generated for Project
1 / Task 2 to meet Project 1 / Task 2 demand.
ASCP will also attempt to minimize any cross project pegging and any cross task
pegging within a project as it evaluates the various pegging options available when
pegging existing project specific and common supplies to project demands.
Customers upgrading to 12.2.5 will see the new plan options set as follows for their
existing ASCP plans post upgrade. These plan option settings, performed through an
upgrade script, will help preserve functional parity in plan output before and after
upgrade. For customers using MSC: Use Attribute Based Netting = Yes, plan option Use
Common Supplies for Project Demands will be set to “No” and plan option Apply Order
Modifiers will be set to “At Reservation Level”. For customers using MSC: Use
Attribute Based Netting = No, plan option Use Common Supplies for Project Demands
will be set to “Yes” and plan option Apply Order Modifiers will be set to “For Soft
Pegged Items only”.
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In this release, ASCP provides the capability to respect reservations. This feature is
available with the planning mode of “Constrained without Detailed Scheduling”.
Reserved: This is a Yes/No attribute that indicates if the supply or demand has a
reservation against it.
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Reserved Quantity: The total quantity of the supply/demand that is reserved to other
supplies/demands.
If a supply is reserved to multiple demands (or vice versa), the various reservations can
be seen by expanding the pegging tree for the supply (to the see the pegs to the demands
and the reserved quantity for each peg) or the demand (to see the pegs to the supplies and
the reserved quantities for each peg).
Purchase orders in ASCP Supply / Demand window are displayed at the Distribution
Line level. In the purchasing source, the purchase order Firm Flag is available at the
Shipment Line and PO Header.
When you firm a distribution line of a shipment line in the Supply / Demand window; all
distribution lines belonging to that shipment line are firmed automatically. This means
that the firm flag is defaulted from your selected distribution line to all other distribution
lines in the parent shipment line.
Removing the firm flag from one of the distribution lines in a shipment line removes the
firm flag from all distribution lines in that shipment line.
In addition, the value of the New Date field from your firmed distribution line is
defaulted to the New Date field of all distribution lines belonging to the same shipment
line as your firmed distribution line.
The value of the New Quantity for a distribution line is defaulted from its own line. You
can modify the New Quantity value for any distribution line separately.
Note – The Implement Date and Implement Quantity in the Release Properties tab are
defaulted to the New Date and New Quantity from Order tab for any distribution line that
is flagged for release.
When a firmed distribution line is released to purchasing source, the parent shipment line
is firmed. Additionally the value of the New Date of the firmed distribution line replaces
the Need by Date value in the parent shipment line.
When a firmed shipment line or a shipment line with a past due shipment date is
collected to VCP, all distribution lines belonging to that shipment line are considered
firm and the distribution line firm flags in the Supply / Demand window are displayed as
checked for the child distribution lines. If the PO header is firmed or the PO header date
is past due, all distribution lines of the PO are collected as firm.
You can use a new profile option called “MSC: Remove Promise Date for
Rescheduled Purchase Orders” to set Promise Date to “NULL” in the Purchasing
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source for all rescheduled purchase orders. This profile option can be set to Yes or No
(Default). By setting this profile option to Yes and monitoring the Promise Date field in
the Planner Workbench, you can determine whether a supplier has committed to a newly
rescheduled purchase order or not.
You can define a number of production slots for each aggregate master scheduling time
bucket, and ASCP will help you create a leveled master schedule that respects the time-
phased slot capacity.
When you navigate to Supplies and Demands from Exceptions, the following exception-
related attributes will be populated:
Exception type navigating from Exception detail available in
S&D
Order with Insufficient Lead Time Actual Lead Time
Minimum Lead Time
End Item Minimum Remaining Shelf Minimum Remaining Shelf
Life Life Shortfall
Items with Forecast over Consumption Over Consumed Quantity
Orders Scheduled to Next Inventory Planned Inventory Point
Point
Demand Quantity not Satisfied Quantity Not Satisfied
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Order Causes Supplier Capacity Supplier Capacity Overload
Overload
Order Causes Transportation Volume Volume Capacity Overload
Capacity Overload
Order Causes Transportation Weight Weight Capacity Overload
Capacity Overload
You can now drill down with context from the graphs in a Metrics Favorites (Plan
Summary) view to Supplies and Demands, to the Material Plan, and to Exception
Details, as applicable.
The results of executing an Items Favorites query can now be searched. Supported search
criteria are:
• Basic Search
o Item
o Organization
o Category
o Planner
• Advanced Search (in addition to the above)
o Description
o Planning Method
o BOM Item Type
Basic Search defaults to the Equals search operator, but Advanced search supports the
following operators.
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From the items view, you can drill to Product Definitions, Supply Chain Bill, Supplies
and Demands, Material Plan and Exceptions. The context that is used to drill these UIs is
based on the ‘Scope’ selector in the toolbar.
• If Scope = Supply Chain, then all components in the bill of material of the
assembly (including alternates) but excluding any substitute components. The
components listed will be only at the next level (not all levels). The drill
navigation results (in all the UIs listed above) in a sort order where the assembly
rows are at the top and the components’ rows are listed below. If multiple rows
are selected in the Items view, the sort order will be assembly 1, assembly 1’s
components, assembly 2, assembly 2’s components etc.
Similar to the Items view, a search region is now available to filter the results of a
Resources Favorites query. The following search criteria are supported:
• Basic Search
o Department
o Resource
o Organization
o Resource Group
• Advanced Search (in addition to the above)
o Resource Type
o Owning Department
• Components
• Substitute Components
• Routing Operations
• Operation Resources
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3.3.10. Release 12.2.6.2
• Items
• Exceptions
• Supply Chain Bill
• Material Plan
• Supplies and Demands
• Plan Options
• Product Definition
• Available Capacity
• Net Available Capacity
• Cumulative Available Capacity
• Capacity Utilization
• Cumulative Capacity Utilization
You can also edit Available Capacity for an Item-Supplier-Supplier Site combination
here.
• In Transit
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• Production Forecast
• Expected Scrap
• Other Independent Demand
• Available to Promise
• Expired Lots
• Payback Demand
• In Receiving
• Payback Supply
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3.5. Oracle Demand Planning
3.5.1. Release 12.1.1
The Fill Data dialog in the worksheet now allows a null entry. The data is replaced with
a null/NA. A recalculate is required to reflect the change across all levels of the
hierarchy.
The profile MSD: Use Classic Even Allocation can now have three values, one of which
signifies that the fallback default allocation for the time dimension will be even. The
three valid choices for the profile are:
• Yes, use even allocation
• No, use first allocation
• No, use first allocation for all dimensions except Time
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3.5.2. Release 12.2.5
The Oracle Demand Signal Repository (DSR) helps manufacturers collect detailed
retailer and other demand data, analyze it to identify issues and opportunities, and
respond via a SOA-enabled services library.
Typical retail data sources include daily point-of-sale, on-hand inventory, store orders
and receipts, returns, store promotions and sales/order forecasts. The DSR transforms
retailer data into manufacturer terms – including manufacturer item identification,
manufacturer hierarchies and calendars. A high-performance data loading facility
cleanses the data and allocates it to a uniform set of dimension levels.
The Demand Signal Repository data model is based upon the Oracle Data Warehouse for
Retail (ODWR) data model, adapted to a manufacturer point of view. An extensive
OBIEE metadata layer sits on top of the ODWR data model, and allows users to develop
custom reports that combine the data in customer-specific ways.
The lowest level in the organization hierarchy is the Business Unit which is a single
customer location. While business unit types are user-defined, the two most common
types of business units are stores and customer distribution centers.
DSR captures several business unit attributes such as address, general contact, and VAT
information, as well as store-specific attributes such as store manager, physical
properties (store size, number of window displays, restrooms, etc.). Additionally,
business units can be associated with a distribution channel and/or a market area to allow
analysis by channel or a market area (such as the Los Angeles market).
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Each business unit has a physical address. This enables the Business Unit to be analyzed
by a geographic dimension, as well as the organization hierarchy.
The other levels of the organization hierarchy (listed from top to bottom) include: Retail
Group, Chain, Area, Region, District, and finally Business Unit. DSR allows you to
aggregate fact data to any level of the customer’s organization hierarchy.
The customer organization hierarchy supports the slowly changing dimension (SCD)
type 2 feature. This feature keeps historical data (e.g., sales) associated with the
hierarchical structure in effect at the time, to ensure proper analysis.
The consumer goods manufacturer can use all calendar types, whereas the only calendar
type that supports customer-specific calendars is the business calendar. By having a
separate business calendar for each customer, the account team or category manager can
view data in terms of the customer’s week, month, etc.
The lowest level in the customer item hierarchy is the SKU. DSR captures several
attributes at the SKU level including price, cost, size, color, style, variety, etc.
Additionally, SKUs can be associated to a brand or group into item clusters to allow
further analysis.
The other levels of the customer item hierarchy (listed from top to bottom) include:
Company, Division, Group, Department, Category, Subcategory, Item and finally SKU.
DSR allows you to aggregate fact data to any level of the customer’s item hierarchy.
The customer item hierarchy supports the slowly changing dimension (SCD) type 2
feature. This feature keeps historical data (e.g., sales) associated with the hierarchical
structure in effect at the time, to ensure proper analysis.
The lowest level in the manufacturer item hierarchy is the SKU. DSR captures several
attributes at the SKU level which can differ from the retailer’s SKU attribute values.
The other levels of the manufacturer’s item hierarchy (listed from top to bottom) include:
Company, Division, Group, Class, Subclass, Item and finally SKU. The manufacturer’s
item hierarchy is seven levels deep, whereas the customer’s item hierarchy is eight levels
deep (to accommodate the broad range of products carried by retailers).
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Like the customer item hierarchy, the manufacturer’s item hierarchy also supports the
slowly changing dimension (SCD) type 2 feature. This feature keeps historical data
(e.g., sales) associated with the hierarchical structure in effect at the time, to ensure
proper analysis.
DSR converts values from the retailer’s currency to the manufacturer’s reporting
currency based upon a conversion table.
By default, reports will use the manufacturer reporting currency. If needed, the reports
can be customized to replace the reporting currency with the retailer currency.
When discovery mode is off, items must be pre-associated with a valid business unit (aka
store) in order to successfully process sales and forecast data for that business unit/item
combination.
When item discovery mode is on, the data loading process will create a new authorized
item/store record the first time that it encounters a SKU at a business unit (store) where it
has never previously been reported.
Organization and time-level allocation profiles define the percentage of the aggregate
value to be allocated to each the day or location. Allocation preserves any fractional
quantity, in order for a data value to be the same when re-aggregated to the level at
which it was originally received.
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a higher level in the organization for a given day or week. Sales reported at an aggregate
level are allocated to the lowest level (by business unit / day).
3.6.2.10. Shipments
The shipments process flow loads shipped units and monetary amount for a given
business unit/item/day. Shipments are reported against a specific store or distribution
center, no allocation logic is supported for shipment data.
3.6.2.11. Orders
The orders process flow loads order quantity and monetary amount for a given business
unit/item/day. Orders (like Shipments) are reported against a specific store or
distribution center, again no allocation logic is supported for order data.
3.6.2.12. Inventory
The item inventory process flow loads on-hand, received, in-transit, backordered, and
quality hold quantities, net costs, and retail amounts for a given business
unit/item/location/day. Item Inventory (like Shipments and Orders) are reported against
a specific store or distribution center, so no allocation logic is supported for order data.
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• Tracking performance relative to pre-defined thresholds
• Drill-down capabilities to view supporting data
• Ability to view by retailer or manufacturer hierarchy
• Automatic delivery of the underlying reports via MS Office tools.
Two separate reports are available: The “Product to Category Coverage by Quarter” and
the “Product to Category Coverage by Period”.
Two reports are available: The “Category Growth Analysis by Volume” report and the
“Category Growth Analysis by Sales” report
Two reports are available: The “Category Sales Volume by Type: and the “Category
Sales Value by Type” report.
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3.6.2.19. Average Price Analysis Report
The Average Price Analysis report compares unit sales and average retail sales price to
the same period last year.
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3.6.2.23. Supply Chain Scorecard
The Supply Chain scorecard shows results against goal comparisons for seven supply-
chain oriented measures. Like the Sales Scorecard, it is divided into four panels, with the
left panels showing the latest results and the right panels showing values summarized by
year. Also like the Sales Scorecard, the top two sections show company performance;
however, the bottom two sections show performance across all manufacturer products at
the customer organization’s “region” level.
The measures for each of the four sections of the supply chain scorecard include Service
Level, Order Cycle Time, and On-Time Delivery, Inventory Cover, On-hand Inventory,
In-Stock %, and Percent returns
All seven measures (Perfect order %, Order change %, Invoice accuracy %, Payment
days, Deduction amount, Item data synchronization % and Item data accuracy %) are
external measures imported into DSR through the ETL process.
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Once exceptions have been created, the Exception Management Dashboard aggregates
and displays exceptions by customer and product category, listing them in order from
highest to lowest number of exception so users can address the most critical areas first.
The exception types analyzed within the Exception Management Dashboard include:
• Imputed Out of Stock Exception where sales are significantly below expected
sales and the probability is very high that the product is out of stock.
• Reorder Point Exception where inventory levels (on-hand plus back order
quantity) are below the customer’s reorder point.
• Overstock Exception where on-hand inventory levels are above the customer’s
reorder point.
• New Item Not Selling Exception which reports on items introduced at the store
within the last 30 days which have no sales.
From each one of these exception types users have the option to view one of the
following reports to get more information.
• The Forecast Accuracy report shows actual versus forecasted sales, deviation
between the two for the selected week as well as prior week.
• The Inventory Position report shows the previous week’s ending balance,
receipts, sales and both an expected ending balance and an actual ending
balance. The customer’s replenishment information (min, max, reorder point,
etc.) is also displayed.
• The Item Distribution report shows the number of authorized stores and the
number of authorized stores not selling, in addition to the average sales per store
selling.
• The Price Deviation report shows average sales price, promotional price,
quantity sold, actual revenue and expected revenue.
Exception history is retained to allow users to track trends on whether exceptions are
increasing or decreasing.
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and time. The set of syndicated consumption data includes pre-calculated ACV
measures as well as other measures such as sales by promotion type, baseline sales, and
coupon sales. Syndicated consumption data can be purchased at various levels of the
product hierarchy and customer organization hierarchy, as well as geographic region or
sub-region.
DSR provides an initial set of 100 generic measures which are renamed during
implementation to match the measures purchased. In addition, the number of measures
can be extended, if needed.
When loading the external measures the product and geography keys supplied by the
syndicated data provider are translated into the appropriate organization, product or
geography hierarchy levels.
A sample set of measures along with an out-of-the-box report is available to use as is, or
rename and revise based on specific customer needs.
The TDLinx store/outlet adapter maps data from the AC Nielson source CSV file to the
Organization Business Unit Interface table. From there the existing Organization
Hierarchy ETL process flow can be used to update the Organization Business Unit
(DDR_R_BSNS_UNIT) target table.
• Color-coded performance indicators which are based on the loaded goals and
thresholds.
• “Latest Results” are now based on weekly results, goals and thresholds.
Previously, the latest results displayed daily values, which was too granular.
• “Overall Results” are now based on YTD results. Previously, the scorecard
compared a yearly goal against the associated measure (e.g., unit sales) for a
given year. This allows users to monitor performance throughout the year
(rather than waiting until the end of the year).
• Both the measure value and the color-coded performance indicator are displayed
on the main scorecard pages
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• When drilling down from the scorecard, the year filter criterion is passed to the
underlying report. In addition, the associated chart is displayed first (before any
table data)
On the operations scorecard, the Deduction Balance measure has replaced the Deduction
Amount measure.
The example below illustrates how stores from different retailers can be assigned to store
clusters based on average income, lifestyle and geographic location. A store cluster
report is available to analyze sales by store cluster type (e.g., Average income, Lifestyle,
Coastal) to see breakdown of sales by each unique cluster.
The example below illustrates how SKUs from different product categories can be
assigned to item clusters based on average container material, primary shopper and brand
perception.
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3.6.3.7. Replenishment Rules
DSR supports the loading of customer replenishment rules to provide visibility into the
criteria used by the store or distribution center when reordering products. This
information can be used to determine whether out-of-stocks or overstocks are being
caused by an inappropriate inventory management policy, or to anticipate future order
volumes.
The replenishment rules are used by the exception management workbench to display
over and under stock conditions. The replenishment rules are also accessible to the end
user when building ad-hoc queries.
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3.6.3.8. Allocation Rules
DSR has the ability to allocate POS and sales forecast facts received at an aggregate
level to the business unit / day level. The time allocation and organization allocation
percentages have been exposed in the BI Answers catalog, so end users can view the
percentages that were used when allocating sales facts to the business unit or day level.
• The ability to load manufacturer promotion information using out of the box
generic interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows
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o Expected vs. actual sales by promotion type (e.g., display, feature, etc.)
to analyze results by promotion tactic
o Promotion compliance by promotion type
• Context sensitive drilldowns are available from the manufacturer promotion
dashboard to display:
o Manufacturer Promotion Summary Results which compare actual
promotion results against expectations at the promotion/customer level.
o Manufacturer Promotion Detail Results which compare actual promotion
results against expectations at the promotion/customer/SKU level.
3.6.4.2. Manufacturer Shipments
Manufacturers need visibility into products as they move downstream in the supply chain
to the consumer. In previous releases, Oracle Demand Signal Repository provided
visibility of products at customer locations (either distribution centers or retail stores),
but did not have visibility into shipments leaving the manufacturer’s facilities.
Oracle Demand Signal Repository has been enhanced to capture manufacturer shipments
to provide end to end visibility of products as they leave the manufacturer’s site all the
way to the store and ultimate sale to the consumer. The functionality within this feature
includes:
• The ability to load manufacturer shipment information using out of the box
generic interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows
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• The ability to load distributor reference information using out of the box generic
interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows. This includes
loading:
o Distributor organization hierarchy
o Distributor item hierarchy
o Distributor business calendar
o Distributor replenishment rules
• The ability to load distributor fact information using out of the box generic
interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows. This includes
loading:
o Distributor shipments
o Distributor inventory
o Distributor shipment forecast (see Forecast Type and Purpose Code
enhancement)
• Creation of a new Distributor dashboard which shows:
o Manufacturer shipments by distributor
o Distributor shipments by customer
o Weekly manufacturer shipment trend
o Forecast accuracy by distributor
o Distributor inventory by product category
o Customer shipments by distributor
o Distributor throughput (inbound and outbound shipments) by product
Category
o Weekly distributor throughput trend
The Alternate Organization Hierarchy feature allows alternate views of the customer’s
organization to co-exist within DSR along with the original customer organization
hierarchy. Facts can be inquired upon using the original customer organization
hierarchy, or one or more alternate organization hierarchies.
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so that account team’s can still talk to customers in terms of the customer’s view of their
organization.
• Ability to view customer data at aggregate levels that represent the various ways
in which the manufacturer conducts business with the customer.
• Ability to analyze fact data at a level that is equivalent to other systems in use by
the Manufacturer. For example, to analyze and report on DSR retail demand data
by planning account (i.e., a level in an alternate organization hierarchy), which
would be equivalent to the planning account used in Demantra Predictive Trade
Planning or Siebel Consumer Goods.
Additional Information
DSR ships with a sample alternate organization hierarchy exposed in the Answers web
catalog which has four levels exposed. To use additional alternate organization
hierarchies, the DSR repository must be modified to define the number of levels being
used and the names of each level to be exposed. Up to ten levels within an alternate
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organization hierarchy can be exposed without requiring any physical data model
changes.
• To differentiate the types of forecasts provided by the retailer, the forecast data
contains two additional attributes.
o Forecast Type. The forecast type code indicates whether the forecast
quantity includes only base demand (without promotional volumes),
promotional demand only, or "total" demand (including both base and
promo).
• Existing out of the box reports and dashboards were modified to specify that the
forecast data being displayed had a Forecast Purpose code of SALES and a
Forecast Type of TOTAL. This is to maintain parity with the original intent of
the reports.
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3.6.4.8. Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimensions
By default, Oracle Demand Signal Repository supports Type 2 Slowly Changing
Dimensions (SCD) on the following dimensions:
• Organization
• Manufacturer Item Hierarchy
• Customer (Retail) Item Hierarchy
Historically, the Type 2 SCD feature is always turned on for these three dimensions.
With this release, Type 2 SCD functionality can be turned off at implementation time to
give customers the option whether to use this feature or not.
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3.7. Oracle Demantra – All Products
This release will enhance the Demantra data model to enable supporting week-to- month
calendar rollups. Functionality supported:
• Pre-configured Calendar Months time aggregation
• View Weekly data via Calendar Months, Quarters and Years
• Update data in Calendar Months, Quarters and Years
This will reduce configuration time needed to apply this configuration at key customers,
improve implementation delivery times and maintain or improve engine run times.
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3.7.1.6. Improved Multi-Language Support
As a further improvement on language support, Demantra 12.2 includes support for
multiple languages within a single instance. This will enable users to select from a list of
supported languages at login, and review and collaborate in their selected language.
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is to provide a means of assessing and addressing declines in database performance due
to out-of-order tables.
Any users that are not explicitly “locked out” of the system will be able to log in and
access worksheets as usual.
An administrator defines the period of time when users will not be able to access
Demantra worksheets, and when the system will notify affected users (via a Task pop-up
message dialog, and optionally by email) informing them of the date and time when the
system will be unavailable. The administrator also chooses whether specific users, user
groups or all users will be locked out.
If a user is currently making changes in a worksheet when the specified lockout period
begins, they will be prompted to save their work before they are automatically logged out
of the application.
When the specified lockout period ends, users will be able to log in to Demantra and
resume their work. If necessary, an administrator can also manually end the lockout
period before the specified end time.
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3.7.2.2. Support Additional Demantra Hierarchies in APCC
As part of the 12.2.1 release, APCC was enhanced to support displaying a custom
product hierarchy that has been defined in Demantra. This allows more flexible and
seamless integration between Demantra Demand Management or Demantra Sales &
Operations Planning and the Advanced Planning Command Center.
12.2.4 will support two additional custom hierarchies to be brought from Demantra into
APCC. One for the Organization Dimension and one for the Site (Account) dimension.
This will further enhance APCC’s ability to display reports which are better focused on
an individual customer’s needs and align with any customer specific hierarchy they may
have.
Additional enhancements have been made to the Demantra Anywhere (DA) product.
Functionality which was previously only available in a full worksheet is now available in
Demantra Anywhere worksheets as well. You can execute seeded and custom methods,
enabling much more robust support of a variety of business processes, including
promotion management and new item introduction. In addition, you can call the
Demantra engine to execute simulations for ad-hoc what if analysis.
The user’s time zone difference from general system time will be used to adjust the end
of history and beginning of future for the user. In addition, when a user calls a method or
runs a simulation, the time zone they are in is available and can be used to modify the
process being called.
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3.7.3.3. Workflow Recoverability
Workflows in Demantra are used to enable a wide variety of seeded and custom
processes. The custom processes enable scheduled, triggered and user-initiated multi-
step processes. If these processes fail, there are currently several options on how to
recover - including stopping the workflow, retrying from the current workflow step, or
skipping to the next step.
This feature enables a failed workflow to start from another step instead. This can
facilitate resetting of a workflow to a given state required for continuing a process. The
feature will enable more robust use of workflows and lessen concern of data and process
corruption due to mid run failure.
As part of each workflow steps definition, you will have a new recovery option where
you specify the step from which a workflow will restart, regardless of whether the restart
occurs automatically or is user initiated.
Note: The certified single sign on protocol for this release is Oracle Access Manager.
Often there is a requirement to view, interact and forecast at a level which is more
aggregate than Site but without losing visibility to what is happening for given
Customers or Accounts. This enhancement allows the level at which data to be collected
at to include:
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3.7.4. Release 12.2.6
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3.7.6. Release 12.2.6.2
There is support for publishing custom demand series to APCC forecasting measures.
For example, if customer forecasts are maintained in a Demand Management series then
this forecast data can be published to a seeded, generic APCC measure.
Integration is also available for a limited item hierarchy mapping between Demand
Management and APCC. For example, if a custom item hierarchy has been defined in the
Business Modeler (e.g. Item < Product SubGroup < Product Group < Product Line) then
this structure can be replicated automatically in APCC.
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3.9.1. Release 12.2.4
CDP will enable loading of sell-through history at store or site level. This data will serve
as a basis for generation of a sell-through forecast. The sell-through forecast will serve
two purposes.
First it will be converted into a sell-in shipment forecast which can be used on its own or
incorporated into a typical demand management or sales and operation planning process.
Second the sell-through forecast will be used as the starting point for safety stock
calculation. Once safety stock is calculated it is combined with stocking rules to
determine a target inventory value. Target inventory will be combined with metrics such
as on hand, in transit and open orders to generate a simple single tier replenishment plan.
BLE clustering will be called as part of the execution of the analytical engine. It is
possible to call the engine to simply invoke the BLE without generating a forecast.
Daily general levels can coexist with weekly levels in the same data model. When
viewing data, it will be available at a daily and weekly as appropriate. Worksheets will
allow inclusion of series for a daily general level, side by side with other series.
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3.9.1.6. BLE Context Passing
The Batch Logic Engine plays an integral part in calculating safety stock and
replenishment orders associated with CDP. In order to support invoking the BLE more
effectively in a real time fashion, BLE can now be called from several different ways
• Workflow
o Available prior to 7315
• Workflow with an extra filter
o Allows calling of the same BLE worksheets by different workflow steps
all using a different filter. Ideal when different business units need to
have BLE execute at different times
• Called from worksheet update
o Allows the context of the update to drive the population on which BLE
is run
• Called from a method
o Allows the context of the method drive the population on which BLE is
run
All of these options allow execution of the BLE on the right population at the right time
ensuring any time phased calculations are accurate and up to date.
The introduction can be executed in real time or scheduled for a nightly run.
The introduction can be executed in real time or scheduled for a nightly run.
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3.9.2.2. New OBIEE Versions
Release 12.2.5.1 of In-Memory Performance Driven Planning is certified with OBIEE
11.1.1.7 and OBIEE 11.1.1.9.
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3.11. Oracle Demantra – Predictive Trade Planning
Additionally Trade Analysts will be able to view the promotion hierarchy both in
aggregate and detail. All relevant series associated with trade planning will be available
in seeded or configurable reports. Information can drive both promotional historical
performance analysis as well as future projections and funding.
• The Population Dates label that appears on the method dialog will be configurable
by Population Attribute.
o The maximum number of members that can be selected for the level if
applicable.
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• The following additional actions will be provided for invoking methods from a
Calendar View:
o Selecting a member on the calendar and pressing the “DELETE” key on the
keyboard will invoke the “Delete” method.
• The ability to print a Calendar View in a presentable format will be provided. When
printing a Calendar View:
o The time level selected for the Calendar View on the worksheet (days within
weeks, weeks within months, or months within years) will be retained on the
print out.
o The row and column headers will be repeated on each page of the print out.
• All of the settings required to run a simulation will be combined onto a single dialog.
• Simulation will be able to be invoked using the saved settings with a single click.
• When a simulation completes the notification message will provide the option to
rerun the worksheet.
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3.11.2.5. Enhanced Support for Shipment and Consumption Planning
When planning the promotional demand for shipments and consumption it is important
to recognize that the date ranges for each demand can be different. Typically, for a
single promotion the shipment demand occurs in advance of the consumption demand.
Since Demantra provides a single set of Population Dates which drive the data storage
for a promotion, planning and forecasting both shipments and consumption can be
challenging. Release 12.2.4 will resolve the gap between shipment and execution dates
on a promotion.
• Engine Profiles will be provided so that when forecasting shipment demand the
engine references the shipment date range for promotions and when forecasting
consumption demand the engine references the consumption date range for
promotions.
• Seeded series will reference relevant date ranges for shipments and consumption to
ensure correct budget and funding calculations.
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• Vehicle cost overrides: The vehicle_cost expression has been changed to allow
cost event overrides per causal and per transpose.
• Control over impact of financial constraints: Provide the ability to turn off
financial constraints such as minimum manufacturer or retail margins.
• Define baseline: If a manual override was done to the baseline forecast,
customers might require that value be used as the baseline for the promotion
when calculating Revenue and Profit. In this release, we provide control over
the expression denoting baseline.
With this enhancement, GOP returns the best possible promise date by combining
availability across all sources. The enhancement is enabled by enabling the profile
“MSC: Use Enhanced Forward ATP”. With this enhanced behavior, GOP uses iterative
search logic to determine the most optimal promise date during forward scheduling. This
feature increases the computation burden of the order promising calculation, and may
impact GOP performance, especially in very constrained supply scenarios.
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orders. These enhancements are only available when running Global Order Promising
with the profile option INV: Capable to Promise set to “ATP Based on Collected Data.”
The integration of Global Order Promising with CMRO has been enhanced. Previously
all CMRO work order demands were eligible for ATP checks and would consume
available supply. With this release, it is possible for users to specify a time window.
Only work order demand within this time window will be visible to ATP. This keeps
more supply available for use in promising near term work order demands from work
orders created on short notice for unanticipated but critical maintenance needs. The new
CMRO Material Marshalling workbench includes a capability to perform ATP checks
for work order material requirements.
In this release, GOP introduces a new mode of forward scheduling, enabled through the
existing profile ‘MSC: Use Enhanced Forward ATP’. This profile now has values of
‘No’, ‘Binary Search Based Requested Date’, and ‘Increment Based Requested Date’.
The ‘Binary Search based Requested Date’ value of this profile is identical to ‘Yes’ in
prior releases.
When set to ‘Increment Based Requested Date’, GOP searches for supply on an internal
Requested Date determined by incrementing the previous Requested Date by a number
of working days specified in the new profile ‘MSC: Request Date Increment in Forward
Scheduling (In Days)’. Another new profile ‘MSC: Maximum Increments in Enhanced
Forward ATP’ specifies the maximum number of increments that can be made to the
internal Requested Date. If sufficient supply is not found after the maximum number of
increments, GOP will schedule the order on the Infinite Time Fence.
In this new search mode, GOP will have greater visibility to short-term supplies that are
being phased out through an ECO, resulting in better forward scheduling results.
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Demantra Real Time Sales & Operations Planning and Advanced Planning Command
Center.
Apart from the above, IM-PDP also enables the following features in the Value Chain
Planning products when deployed on Oracle Exadata hardware:
These features will be supported only with Oracle In-memory Performance Driven
Planning deployed on an Oracle Exadata engineered system.
Oracle In-Memory Performance Driven Planning was first introduced in the VCP
12.1.3.9 release, and has been forward ported to VCP 12.2.4.
For more details of the Exadata engineered system configuration please refer to the Exa
system documentation. The high-level solution architecture of the system is shown
below:
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Solution Architecture Diagram
Note: The single-node deployment limitation will remain in place for standard VCP
deployments without In-Memory Performance Driven Planning.
• Collections
• Snapshot
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The VCP data tables will have parallelism enabled and the degree of parallelism will
have a default standard (Auto Degree of Parallelism.) This can be further customized and
fine tuned by customers.
This is a new trellis chart report in the Demand and Supply tab of the Supply Chain
Analyst dashboard. The chart shows a dual-axis Bar and Line graph of the following
facts:
• Total Demand
• Plan (Base Plan and Compare Plans selected in the page prompts)
This report allows you to easily detect product categories with unusual fluctuations in
demand or projected available balance.
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Safety Stock, Projected Available Balance by Item
This is a new trellis chart report in the Demand and Supply tab of the Supply Chain
Analyst dashboard. It shows in a single-axis Line graph the following facts:
• Safety Stock
• Plan (Base Plan and the comparison plans selected in the page prompts)
• Categories
• Org
• Item
This report allows you to easily see where safety stock violations are occurring within
your supply chain. There are no drilldowns enabled for this report.
This is a new trellis chart report in the Exceptions tab of the Supply Chain Analyst
dashboard. It shows in tabular or graphical form the following facts:
• Exception count
• Exception value
• Category
• Exception Type
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This report allows you to see the distribution of exception events across product
categories and time. There are no drilldowns enabled for this report.
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3.14.3.2. New OBIEE Versions
Release 12.2.5.1 of In-Memory Performance Driven Planning is certified with OBIEE
11.1.1.7 and OBIEE 11.1.1.9.
Capabilities previously restricted to IMPDP have been enabled in base products such as
Demand Management and Advanced Supply Chain Planning. In particular, Value Chain
Planning Collections now uses Advanced Queues instead of Oracle DBMS Pipes by
default so as to support multi-node RAC configurations out of the box. This is governed
by the new profile option “MSC: Use Advanced Queues for Planning,” with a default
value of “Yes.” You may still configure Collections to use DBMS Pipes instead of
Advanced Queues by setting “MSC: Use Advanced Queues for Planning” to “No.”
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3.15.3. Release 12.1.3+
IO supports warehouse capacity at either the organization level or at the more granular
“storage type” level within each warehouse. Storage types are user-defined. Typical
values might be “frozen”, “refrigerated”, and “dry goods.” IO considers all categories
belonging to a user-chosen category set in a new Storage Capacity setup window to be
valid storage types. To set the warehouse capacity granularity you can use a new profile
option called “MSR: Warehouse Capacity Granularity”. The list of values for this profile
option includes:
• Organization Level – This allows you to constrain your plan by the total
warehouse capacity of each warehouse. This is the default value.
• Category Organization Level – This allows you to constrain your plan by the
storage capacities of different storage types within each warehouse.
With this enhancement you can instruct Inventory Optimization to adjust safety stock
quantities downward based on the levels of anticipated cycle stock in each echelon of the
supply chain. These adjustments are such that the desired target service levels are
achieved.
You can enable this functionality via the following profile option:
• Yes
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3.15.3.4. Publishing Warehouse Capacity and Cycle Stock Facts to APCC
The Archive Plan Summary concurrent program for Inventory Optimization has been
enhanced by supporting the publishing of the following additional facts related to
warehouse capacity and cycle stock from IO into APCC:
• Available Capacity
• Required Capacity
• Average Cycle Stock
• Average Cycle Stock - Volume
• Inventory Quantity Increment
• Inventory Quantity Increment - Volume
• Average Daily Demand
• Average Daily Demand - Volume
• Projected Available Balance - Volume
• Safety Stock - Volume
These facts are published along the following dimensions:
• Organization
• Category
• Item
• Time
• Plan
Only the “Warehouse Capacity Report – Capacity at Storage Type Level” report is
displayed by default, in the Inventory Planning tab.
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With this enhancement, IO considers the warehouse capacities in conjunction with the
safety stock generated based on the supply lead time variability in addition to the safety
stock needed for demand variability when determines the final inventory location for the
safety stock of an item. In other words¸ the safety stock generated based on supply lead
time variability is accounted for when IO enforces warehouse capacity constraints.
IO considers the demand pattern (regular or intermittent) in its safety stock calculation.
Currently, you can specify an item’s demand pattern as intermittent using an attribute
called “Intermittent Demand” in the Item Attributes Mass Maintenance (IMM) window.
For items for which this attribute is not specified, IO analyzes and determines their
demand patterns as part of the safety stock calculation.
In this release, IO receives the value of the Intermittent Demand attribute (Intermittency
Flag) from Demantra. This value is used in the safety stock calculation if there is no
user-specified value in the IMM.
In addition, the following item attributes related to an item’s demand pattern are now
displayed in the Items window in the PWB:
• Intermittent Demand
• Demand Variance
Note – The Intermittent Demand column is displayed as blank if the demand schedule
and Intermittent Demand are at the Item/Zone level.
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• A new ADF based “Material Plan” screen to view calculated policy
parameters
• Changes to the “Service Levels and Fulfillment Lead Time” UI to enable the
specification of two tiered service levels and fulfillment lead times
• Category Set: The Category Set selected here determines the Categories for
which you can specify Policy Parameters. Once the Category Set has been
selected, you can select either all Categories in the category set through the
“Include All Categories” check box, or select only specific categories.
• For each Category, you can specify either Policy Parameters across all Orgs, or
only for a specific Org. For every Category-Org, an attribute called “Time
Phased Setup” determines whether the Category –Org is associated with time
varying attributes (or not). The “Include in Calculation” attribute determines
whether you want Policy Parameters for the items within the Category-Org to be
recalculated. Having specified these high level criteria, you can then enter
detailed Policy Parameters for each Category-Organization
Min-Max
o Target Service Level %: This specifies the target service level for the
Category
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o Annual Order Count: This is relevant editable only for “ROP-OQ”. This
is a specification that is used to derive the Order Quantity by dividing
the total demand over the last year by this number
o Order Cycle Calendar: This is only relevant for the “FOC-Max” Policy:
you can define the Calendar which determines when orders can be
placed
o Fixed Order Quantity: Either used as “EOQ” for the Items where EOQ
cannot be calculated, or as the Order Quantity for the ROP-OP policy if
specified. Is editable only for ROP-EOQ and ROP-OQ type of policies
A new field at the header of the Plan Options screen called “Policy Parameters Set
Name” has been added – this is used to specify the Policy Parameters Set which contains
the Policy parameters defined at a Category level, and is a mandatory field. The field
“Planned Items” is disabled when the planning method is set to “Policy Planning” –
items to be planned when the planning method is set to “Policy Planning” are derived
from the categories associated with the Policy Parameter set.
At the header level, other existing fields like “Service Level Set Name”, “Assignment
Set Name” and “Item Simulation Set Name” are relevant for Policy Planning also, and
must be specified as usual.
Within the “Main” region of the Plan Options screen, only the “Plan Start Date” and
“Plan End Date” are editable the Planning Method is set to “Policy Planning”.
Within the “Organization” region of the Plan Options screen, the “Global Demand
Schedules” attribute is disabled when the Planning Method is set to “Policy Planning”.
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The entire “Constraints” region in the Plan Options screen is disabled when the Planning
Method is set to “Policy Planning”.
3.15.6.4. New profile to determine Loss Function based safety stock calculation
A new site level profile called “MSC: Enable Loss Function Based Safety Stock
Calculation” has been introduced to determine whether the safety stock calculation in IO
uses a loss function based approach or a regular approach. The default value of this
profile is “No” – the profile is relevant only for “Policy Planning”.
In a loss function based safety stock calculation, the probability of not meeting demand
of a certain quantity at a stocking level is weighed by the quantity by which the demand
exceeds the stocking level. This can lead to different safety stock quantities when
compared with the traditional mechanism of safety stock calculation.
You can thus specify two tiers of service levels and fulfillment lead times. With two
tiered service levels, IO will do a first run considering the first tier service level and lead
time, and calculate the stock required to meet this service level.
IO will then do a second pass, considering the second tier service level, but while doing
so, ensure that the safety stock quantity as calculated in the first run is maintained. This
is useful in scenarios where you want to maintain a certain minimum level of stock at the
most downstream locations closest to the customer (low service level, with 0 fulfillment
lead time) and position more safety stock (corresponding to higher service levels) at
higher echelons.
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• Order Cycle Calendar – used to specify days on which replenishment orders can
be created
In addition to the above, the existing “Target Service Level %” parameter will also be
considered by IO during policy calculation.
The above parameters have also been added as supported attributes for bulk uploading
data into the IMM through the already existing upload mechanism.
• Order Quantity or Economic Order Quantity: this can either be a specified Order
Quantity in the Policy Parameter Set, or this may need to be calculated based on
the Annual Order Count or based on ordering cost and carrying cost (for EOQ)
as below
The Order Quantity can be specified in the Policy Parameter Set at the Category Level,
or in the IMM at the Item level, or can be derived from the forecast of the item and the
Annual Order Count if the Annual Order Count is specified in the Policy Parameter Set.
The EOQ calculation requires the fixed cost per order and the annual carrying cost per
unit of an item to be specified in the IMM. These are then used to calculate the EOQ as:
Where,
Q *= Economic Order Quantity
D = Annual Demand Quantity of the product
C = fixed cost per order (not per unit, in addition to unit cost)
H = annual carrying cost per unit
The Annual Demand Quantity can be derived from the IMM attribute “Annual Sales –
Quantity” which is populated when the concurrent request “Calculate Annual Demand”
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is launched. The Fixed Cost per Unit and Annual Carrying Cost per Unit are new item
attributes in the IMM
Based on the values of the Safety Stock, Order Quantity and average daily demand,
policy parameters for each policy type are calculated as below:
Min (Units) = Safety Stock (units) + Average Daily Demand * Lead Time
Safety Stock (Days) = Safety Stock (Days) as calculated in IO or Safety Stock (Qty) /
Average Daily Demand
Min (Units) = Safety Stock (Units) + Average Daily Demand * Lead Time (Note that the
Reorder Point or ROP is equivalent to Min)
The Reorder Point or ROP calculation is identical to the calculation of the Min in the
Min-Max (Days) calculation. The OQ or EOQ is always calculated as a quantity (as
described above)
First, the Min is calculated as: Min (Units) = Safety Stock (units) + Average Daily
Demand * Lead Time
Then the Max is calculated as: Max (Units) = Min + Order Quantity
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Search Region: The Material Plan has a search area with ability to search by
Organization, Category, Item and specific Measures
Search Results Region: This shows the Policy Parameters for an Item-Org, by week. The
following new measures are displayed in the new Material Plan:
• Policy Type
• Policy UOM
• Order Quantity
• Min (Units)
• Max (Units)
• Min (Days)
• Max (Days)
• Edit Plan Inputs (ADF): This is a link to the Item Attribute Mass Maintenance
(IMM) ADF screen
• Create Plan (ADF) : This is a link to create a new IO Plan through the ADF
screen
• Launch Plan (ADF): This is a link to launch Plan through an ADF screen
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3.17. Oracle Production Scheduling
3.17.1. Release 12.1.1
These alert categories and types are added to the Model Workspace in the form of a tree
control for easier navigation and summary data visualization
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The alert view is now tab based and summarized by category / type and is context
sensitive to selection within the Model Workspace for easier navigation
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3.17.1.4. Access Operation and Routings from Operation Instances
This usability enhancement allows the user to perform a right click on a given operation
in any of the schedule Gantt charts and easily drill down to the operation and/or routing
diagrams. This avoids the user having to navigate back through to the model workspace
or the “where used” properties of a resource to in order to be open an operation.
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This works well, but if there are many sales orders and the user wishes to create a work
order for each demand / line item combination this could potentially take quite a bit of
time.
A new feature has been added to PS that allows users to automatically create Work
Orders for a given sales order without even navigating to the Work Order Editor.
A simple right click on a demand or a folder or a subset / mixture of folders and demands
(via multi-select) allows users to automatically create a work order per demand.
o All (will search all model objects listed below and their description fields as well)
o Supplies and Demands only
o Work Orders only
o All Resources
o Crews only
o Machines only
o Tools only
o Items only
o Operations only
o Routings only
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3.17.1.7. Visibility to Demand Fulfilled via Starting Inventory
In previous versions of PS, if an order was fulfilled from both production and either
starting inventory or a supply event, the starting inventory was not simultaneously
displayed in the Production Pegging view (only the Production). This release addresses
this by explicitly detailing each of the pegging relationships.
This applies to materials, WIP and finished goods. The demand for “Item A” shows a
green diamond at the start of horizon indicating some of the order is taken from
inventory. The production below it indicates the remaining quantity is from
manufacturing activities. “Material 1” is consumed in operation A and pegged to both an
on-hand quantity and a purchase recommendation.
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While this provides excellent feedback to users, it also introduces another issue – the
operations cannot actually be run in the past. Prior to this release of PS, reconciling the
schedule was primarily performed by using Cut | Paste in the Resource Gantt.
This release of PS provides the user with a right click menu item “Enforce Horizon
Start” on resources. Enabling this flag (or setting it in the data model) and performing a
repair solve will “push forward” all operations on that resource to the start of the horizon
while maintaining operation sequence and at the same time respecting upstream /
downstream precedence constraints. Enabling this flag (or setting it in the data model)
and performing a coldsolve will accomplish the same thing without user intervention (i.e.
Auto-reconciliation).
For example, in the diagram below, the operations running on Die Bonder 2 are running
behind. The user selects Die Bonder 2, performs a right click, selects “Enforce Horizon
Start” and performs a
repair solve (or cold
solve). (Users are also
able to multi-select and
enable this flag for all
highlighted resources).
The operations on the
applicable resource are
“pushed forward”,
maintaining the original
sequence. This can also
be persisted in the data
model for a given
resource as well.
Operations running in the past will be pushed to start at the beginning of the horizon.
The sequence of operations on the resource will not be changed. In many cases, the
operations running behind will be one of several operations that are contained within a
routing. Since routings have precedence constraints between operations, moving
operations from the past to horizon start may have consequences on other operations in
the routing. Any upstream or downstream pegged operations of this operation will be
pushed forward (if precedence constraints dictate).
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This enhancement to PS enables the following behavior:
o Allows users to explicitly define a given resource as “Batchable” along with a
minimum and maximum spot capacity
o Define a pull forward window to allow a resource to be filled to its minimum
spot capacity
o Allow users to explicitly associate 1 or more user defined attributes and attribute
values to an item. T
o Automatic grouping of operations on a batchable resource by attribute
o If this is 1 attribute (such as temperature), all operations will be grouped together
of the same temperature up to the max capacity of the resource.
o If the user groups by more than 1 attribute (for example temperature and
duration), this implies that all operations sharing the same duration and
temperature will be run together to the max capacity of the resource.
o Manually move operations between batches if desired or manually move an
entire batch. For example, if a sequence on a resource is scheduled to be 10
Hours at 500 Degrees followed by 12 Hours at 400 Degrees, the user can switch
the order (via cut/paste, drag/drop, resequence in the resource Gantt).
For example, the Resource Gantt below illustrates several ovens (CC4101 -> CC4105).
Each of these ovens constrain a variety of operations which are running at the same time
and grouped by temperature and duration. The summary color at the oven level indicates
spot utilization. Bubble help indicates the attributes of the batch and one can utilize an
option in the Toolbar which allows you to highlight only certain batches if you wish (in
orange).
Batches are of course applicable to regular manual scheduling activities. You can cut,
paste entire batches between ovens, move operations from batch to another, resequence
batches and even manually move operations into another batch which does not share the
same attributes (you will be provided with a warning…).
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resource assignment within only a selected group of operations within this routing - for
example, operation steps 10, 20 and 30 must run on the same resource but steps 40,50
and 60 even though share a common resource with their preceding operations can run on
the alternate. This enhancement in PS allows users to be able to configure PS to do just
this.
Consider the following manufacturing routing. To make item “A”, it must through a
setup, run and cleanup operation where it is then cooled. The item passes through a
recursive process - Setup(2), Run(2), and Cleanup(2). With the exception of the Cooling
operation, all operations run on either M1 or M2, as illustrated for the first Run
operation.
When the first setup operation occurs on either M1 or M2, resource assignment must
be the same for the following 2 operation steps.
If M1 is chosen in the setup operation, it must also be chosen in the run and cleanup.
(You don’t want to cleanup a machine that you didn’t run on).
The cooling process occurs in a staging area. However, after the cooling operation
takes place, the same logic occurs for the next recurrence of the setup, run and
cleanup operations, but a different alternate can be chosen.
The first three steps must run on the same machine and the last three steps must also
run on the same machine.
The user opens up the properties of the routing and creates 2 distinct groups and assigns
the first 3 operations to the first group and the last 3 operations to the second group as
illustrated.
The user performs a solve. The first three operations are run on M1. After the cooling
operation, the remaining three operations are run on M2. This could of course all be on
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M1 or all of M2 or in reverse order. The point is the operations in the groups share the
same resource.
If operations are not assigned to groups, they are permitted to be run on any
given resource.
If the user is using All of Sets (i.e. >1 Resource such as a Machine1 and Tool1
OR a Machine2 and Tool2), consistent resource assignment applies to the group;
i.e. the group must be the same.
When migrating a model from previous versions, the import will detect if a
routing has consistent resource assignment selected and auto-create a group and
assign all operations to it.
If the resource specific cycle size checkbox is selected, planners can enable this flag
by CRO resource. Therefore, different lines in the plant can be on their own cycle
times rather than having to adhere to global cycle.
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3.17.1.12. Minimize Work Order Schedule Infeasibilities
As Production Scheduling is a finite capacity scheduling application, some situations can
occur which would result in an infeasible production schedule. These situations are
always being monitored and resolved through improved data validation, alerting and
solver handling of problematic inputs, and has drastically improved throughout the past
several releases. This release continues to improve on this theme. For example, it is
quite common and sometimes unavoidable to have:
o >1 work order operation firmed on a same single capacity resource with
overlapping date / times.
o A firm date range on a work order operation which is shorter than total
operation run / elapsed time
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Solved in a previous version – the schedule was infeasible and the planner was provided
with an error message indicative of such.
In this release, the schedule is feasible. The highest priority work order is moved to start
earlier in the horizon.
Supporting alerts are also provided to the user to indicate the firm date violation.
This feature cross references the routing template to “break down” work order operations
into the lot multiples specified on the routing. The feature can be enabled as either a
global option applying to all routings, or the user can specify the feature for specific
routings. For example, if this feature is leveraged, a work order is scheduled to release
inventory according to every lot multiple. In the example below, inventory is moved
between operations in 25 unit increments – the work order has only 3 operations listed
on it, but PS will break it down according to the routing lot multiple.
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In this case, the setup & cleanup operations only need to be executed once as opposed to
three times. This release of PS has the ability to specify an operation of type “Setup,
Production or Cleanup”.
Setup and Cleanup operations will not be broken down to their units of effort.
This means that resource exclusivity relationships can now be defined directly within a
given operation as opposed to having to use Operation Sets.
For example, Operator 1 can only run Line 1 and Line 3. Operator 2 can only run Line 3
and Line 2. The new operation structure within PS is depicted below.
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The work order editor has a new column to indicate the name of the “all of” set. This is
where manual overrides can be made to which set is attached to the work order. If an
alternate set has a different number of resources, rows will be added / subtracted as
appropriate.
Paste targets in the Gantt charts are consistent with previous versions of PS. Offloading
to an alternate set will show the target in orange. Pasting to a different time on the same
set will be highlighted in light blue.
A “1 of” resource set can contain a mixture of “All of” sets, plus single resources.
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The “All of Sets” are shown in the Production Pegging View. The operations on the
solver selected “All of Set” is summarized on the set name, so the user will have
visibility into which “All of” set has been chosen without expanding all of the sets.
From an offloading perspective, the overall approach is virtually the same as previous
versions of PS, but the offloading calculation must be applied to all members of the set.
If any one of the resources within an “All of” set have their threshold violated, all
resources will be offloaded. If any one of the resources in the target “All of” set have
their offload thresholds violated prior to the offloading taking place, the operation will
not be offloaded to that set. At this point, an additional alternate will be evaluated - if
no alternates have available capacity, no offloading should take place. If the primary is
significantly overloaded, offloading will still occur to less loaded (but still overloaded)
alternates. This effectively spreads the load and will help get orders met as quickly as
possible.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document Oracle Production Scheduling 137
3.17.1.15. Hard Links between Work Orders
This enhancement allows a “many to many” relationship amongst Work Orders along
with the ability for the user to specify precedence constraints between these Work
Orders. This is handy if a specific sequence is required between several work orders.
The business requirements for this enhancement are best explained with a simple
example. Assume the following manufacturing process.
To make Item A, the following routing steps take place. The lot multiple across the
manufacturing routing is 25 units. Item A is produced by Operation C.
Material A is a subassembly also manufactured in the plant as per the following process.
The lot multiple across this routing is also 25 units. The material is produced by
Operation C1.
Assume the user creates a work order for the finished good and the material (50 units
each).
These Work Orders are related through inventory, so will generally schedule JIT and
have some degree of overlap as illustrated below.
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If the user wishes to explicitly relate these Work Orders to one another (for example for
lot control, quality reasons etc), they can specify the relationship in the work order editor
in the new “Related Work Orders” tab. Precedence relationships (to facilitate a cooling
process, inspection etc) can also be specified, along with min / max separation
constraints.
Assume the user populates “Starts After End” with a minimum separation time of 5
Hours. When “Units of Effort” is used, the 5 hour minimum separation is applied to the
pegged work order routing instances. In this case, the Work Orders are for 50 units each
(remember, the routing has a lot multiple of 25 units), therefore there are 2 routing
instances and separation is applied twice.
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3.17.1.16. Dynamic Throughput Rates on Resources
Some customers vary their production rates fairly dynamically and frequently. For
example, the speed of a line can change daily or weekly based on available labor. The
net effect of dynamic rate changes is simple – they make a given manufacturing
operation take more or less time to complete in a given time interval.
There are various reasons why the speed of a production line may change which may
include (but by no means are limited to) areas such as:
• trial manufacturing
• process changes
• line improvements
• labor constraints
• new product development
• temperature / humidity variations
This release of PS provides the user with the ability to specify dynamic rates on a
resource (crew, machine, tool).
Assume due to a labor constraint, the packer now runs at the following throughput rates:
• 80% in the 1st week
• 100% in the 2nd week
• 150% in the 3rd week
The user navigates to the Packer resource properties to the “Throughput tab” and defines
the appropriate dynamic percentages.
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The speed at which the items are produced can clearly be seen in Gantt chart by the
operation length as well as by looking at the steepness of the slope of the item graph for
a given item.
If >1 resource on the operation also has a dynamic throughput range, the “lowest” value
for a given time interval “wins”. For example, if an operation requires both “Packer 1”
and “Tool 1” and they have competing dynamic throughput rates and effective ranges.
In a resource set, resources can have different throughput rates for different date ranges.
If production is offloaded to an alternate resource with a different throughput, the
operation duration on the alternate resource will reflect the new throughput.
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If the user offloads an operation manually to a different resource with a different rate, the
operation duration will change according to the throughput in effect.
If the user changes the rate on a resource and runs a repair solve, the repair solve will
recognize and change the duration of the operation accordingly.
This is useful if PS is to be the system of record for any data that is not available within
the ERP system.
The next time a model is imported into PS, integration processes could be
extended to reference the various data model elements exported from the
previous scheduling session which could amend to the new model prior to import
A new tab in the Publish Profiles allows users to define which data objects to publish
Whenever the Publish Process is called (whether in batch or interactively), the chosen
data will be exported to a user named XML file.
Interactively, the published model is based off of the approved schedule
Since the schedule publish process batch file points to a named scenario, you can
export the model from any given scenario which may or may not be the approved
schedule.
Aspects of the model can be output to a user defined filename – any object within the
model can be output to this specific file.
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3.17.1.19. PS XML Model – Unique Extension
The PS XML data files which can be imported and exported now have an additional
extension available. The PS XML non compressed file can be the standard .xml
extension or uniquely to PS as an .ops. The .ops file is still standard XML format, but
will launch PS directly upon being double clicked. The PS XML compressed file can be
the standard .xml.gz extension or uniquely to PS as an .opz. The .opz file is still standard
compressed XML format, but will launch PS directly upon being double clicked. The
icon for either is the PS standard icon.
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In a previous release of PS, a new feature was added to PS which removed the PS
dependency on having a routing template pre-created in the model for every work order
in the application. For those scenarios outlined, PS dynamically cross references the
work order routing against the routing template during the import process. If a work
order meets on of the problematic scenarios outlined earlier, one can expect to see a
newly created routing which directly corresponds to the work order in question. If
operations differ from their standard templates, a newly created operation will be present
in the routing as well.
When PS was generating this routing and operation templates, it was not reading the
precedence constraints on the work order routing between the operations, nor were the
resource sets being constructed. This release of PS has enhanced logic in the import
process which addresses these 2 issues. When generating the precedence constraints for
the auto-generated routing, the import now looks at the operation codes and cross
references the precedence constraints on the routing. If the work order has different
precedence constraints than the routing template, the precedence constraints as specified
on the work order routing will be used when the auto-generated routing is created.
Similarly for resource sets - the operation template is reference to reconstruct the
resource sets.
For example, after analyzing the schedule, the user approves the schedule he/she is
happy with. The user then performs a right click on the scenario name and selects a new
option “Edit Work Order Release”.
This launches a new dialog view which lists all work orders and their various attributes.
The Publish Profile selected has a Release Horizon. Any Work Orders starting within
this release horizon will be auto-selected. The user can override this if desired.
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3.17.2. Release 12.1.2
Currently in Production Scheduling, users can dictate to the solver engine which
resource or group of resources should be focused on and in what order - essentially
enabling scheduling in an incremental fashion via some simple configuration in the
application. However, solver objectives cannot be set changed each stage – they are set
at a global level.
The scope of this enhancement is to allow different solver objectives by solve stage. For
example, one may wish to optimize changeovers on the injection molder, then mix the
upstream materials JIT, then immediately pack the kits and assemblies from the molding
using a prebuild solve strategy. This approach optimizes the bottleneck stage while
minimizing WIP between upstream / downstream stages.
2) Insert breakpoints where the user can review solve progress at any given stage (and
even refine the schedule as appropriate via manual scheduling and then resume the
larger solve process).
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3) Setup Multi-stage Campaign Run Optimization (CRO) – users will have the ability to
utilize the CRO algorithm in a multi-stage fashion provided the stages have
decoupling inventory and the CRO resource is not recursive.
This enables Production Scheduling users to have their models presolved on the server –
saving time and improving efficiency. It also allows for batch solving of multiple plans
(i.e. Automation of the “what if” process).
The server side functionality creates a deployable solved model which includes import
and solver statistics in log files which are all downloaded to the client desktop on planner
request. This enhancement also includes improved application status logging and
filtering - including access to various event statuses and solver statistics log from within
Production Scheduling for events which took place on the server.
Cut/Paste
Resequence
Remove idle
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Change durations of operation instances
Change start or end times of operations
Change calendar events in the Gantt charts (add / remove / change)
Change resource assignment (i.e. manually offload)
Fixing / Unfixing operations (single or multiple operations)
Change lead times for Purchase Order Recommendations.
Following each of these actions, there is a repair based solve action to institute the
change and “repair” any upstream / downstream ramifications this change may have
caused. However it is possible that the user may not accept the repaired schedule or
simply made a mistake when implementing this change. This enhancement to
Production Scheduling provides the ability to “Undo” these changes. The Undo action
reverts back to the previous “solve state” prior to the change. Examples include:
Undo also applies to another new feature in Production Scheduling (Resource Business
Objectives). Included in this feature is the ability to solve groups of resources in a
“Stage” and perform manual scheduling activities between stages (i.e. at a breakpoint) in
the solve process. Undo can be performed within this context as well. This includes
the ability to undo manual changes in the stage itself as well as to completely undo a
given “stage” of the solve process - upon which the solution will revert back to the
previous solved “stage”.
For example:
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3.17.2.4. Attribute Based Sequence Dependent Setups
Operations and Groups will have attributes assigned to them. Changeover rules specified
by attribute will automatically associated all operations sharing the same attribute.
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This enhancement to Production Scheduling also allows the user to specify if
changeovers can be concurrent or sequential if multiple attributes are specified and can
be performed at once. For example – if I am performing a size changeover, can the
flavor changeover be performed at the same time or does it have to follow the size
changeover?
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CRO Manufacturing Cycle
Boundaries shown in brown.
A new “Resource Utilization” alert has been introduced to indicate when resources
which are not part of a bottleneck resource group have capacity violations (when
capacity constraints are relaxed). Drilldowns to the Gantt charts from all resource alerts
are included this new alert as well.
When using Batchable resources, drilldowns are also now provided from the “Minimum
Batch Violation” alerts as previous versions did not allow this.
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3.17.2.7. Drilldowns from the Work Order Editor to the Gantt Charts
Additional drilldowns introduced in the application make finding work orders in the
Gantt charts much easier. The drilldown from the work order editor which is launched
via right click in the editor from the operation code takes the user directly to either the
Production Pegging view, the Resource or Operation Gantt views. Drilldown from the
Work Order Editor highlights the selected operation and performs a context sensitive
zoom as well.
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3.17.2.8. Mass Change on Items and Resources
For mass change simulations, Production Scheduling now provides the ability to mass
edit item and resource properties. All item properties and resource properties can easily
be changed simply by multi-selecting the appropriate items or resources in the model
workspace and invoking the “change” function. Change is specific to the scenario and
session only for simulation and scenario comparison purposes (changes are not sent back
to ERP)
Changing Item Data via right click on >1 items and selection of “Change” in the menu:
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3.17.3. Release 12.1.3
Visits – This new data construct allows users to associate one or more work orders,
where the work orders will fall inside Visit envelope dates such as the anticipated
aircraft arrival into a maintenance depot and the request date associated with the
completion of the Visit.
Milestones – These provide the ability to specify logical groupings of work orders within
a Visit. The combination of Visits and Milestones provides a capability to define task
hierarchies that flexibly group work orders together in both concurrent and sequential
patterns where work can diverge and converge.
Work Breakdown Structure – Several new key attributes have been added to work orders
which can be used for organizing and filtering work orders.
The scheduling of visits must take into consideration numerous constraints. It must
account for:
To support these requirements, the following key capabilities are now available in Oracle
Production Scheduling:
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Production Scheduling now optionally collects Oracle cMRO maintenance work orders.
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Advanced Work Order Filtering
Work order filters can be used to facilitate the review and analysis of the schedule and
allow the planner to “slice and dice” the data in the various Gantt, Utilization, and Work
Order views. This feature allows the planner to hone in on specific tasks and answer
questions such as “show me all work orders in stage 3a from July 2-July 4 utilizing the
Advanced Airframe and Power crew which are firm”. While this feature has been added
to facilitate cMRO workflows, it will benefit many of our existing manufacturing
customers as they will also be able to filter on many of the existing constructs already
available in work orders.
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Representation of Work Breakdown Structure
The logical grouping of work can be accomplished by leveraging the Work Breakdown
Structure constructs in PS. A Display Parameter tab has been augmented in the Plan
options screen with new data that can be used to create logical groupings of work orders.
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The work breakdown structure is populated as work order attributes and can be viewed
in the work order editor. This allows for advanced filtering in Work Order Filters where
they can be used to group work orders in the various views when analyzing the schedule.
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Once the model is reviewed and analyzed in Production Scheduling, work order dates
generated by the schedule and can then be released back to cMRO for execution.
The solution may be applicable for other industries with similar requirements, but focus
has been on solving aircraft short term maintenance scheduling problems.
3.17.3.2. Disable Multiple Release from the Same Plan for the Same Order
This enhancement allows Production Scheduling to keep track of work orders which are
sent back to source as “Released” and disable subsequent release from the same plan to
prevent creating duplicate supplies in the ERP system. This process functions per the
procedure below:
• The user generates a plan and downloads to the client per standard procedures.
• The user solves the model (if not already solved on the server).
• The user then saves the schedule as a .dxt file (PS persistence for solved models).
This is a key step, as re-importing from XML source will not preserve this
information.
• Once the scheduler is happy with the plan, the user will then approve or “Release”
selected Work Orders to source and publish to ASCP as she/he deems appropriate
(no change to existing functionality).
• After this action, the user will not be able to release the same work orders from the
application as the checkbox indicating which work orders to release will be grayed
out. The user is also free to close the model and reopen the .dxt file as necessary.
Illustration:
The user selects the first four work orders for release:
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The user “releases” back to source:
On subsequent navigation to the Release View, the Work Order Release Checkbox is
no longer selectable for those work orders:
• If the user does want to release the same work orders again for some reason,
they can open the original XML file that was downloaded from integration.
• Any work orders not previously marked as released will still be available for
release or publish (as planned orders) into ASCP.
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3.17.3.3. User Defined Ideal Sequence
The mechanism in which the “ideal” sequence is defined is by selecting and sorting of
associated attributes and their attribute values on CRO resources in the model.
For example, take attributes “Size” and “Grade”. Within “Size” there are 1/4 Inch, 1/3
Inch and 1/4 Inch as attribute values. Within the “Grade” attribute, there are Grades A
and B.
Assume the user defined Ideal Sequence is to cycle by size and grade within the size, as
outlined in the following example:
1/4 Inch-Grade A -> 1/4 Inch Grade B -> 1/3 Inch-Grade A -> 1/3 Inch Grade B -> 1/2
Inch-Grade A -> 1/2 Inch Grade B.
This would be setup in Production Scheduling in the Attributes tab where attributes are
associated to resources.
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“order” in which the selected attributes and attribute values in the right column are
structured in the UI dictates the ideal sequence of operations (the operations must be
associated to these attributes). If Grade was more important than size, then the user
could move the Grade above the Size Attribute. The sequence would then cycle by
Grade and then Size within the Grade.
This is a very powerful tool to help make sequencing decisions and reduce changeovers
in the model.
Since PS is a scheduling application, typically one would assume there are sufficient
supply quantities generated in the form of work orders to meet the stated demand
requirements for the organization being scheduled by the time you are actually
scheduling your facility.
However, PS does not have this explicit supply tolerancing feature. The net result is
that PS may recommend extra production as PS sees the need to balance supply and
demand down to the unit. PS naturally uses the routing lot size to recommend new
production - in some cases, this could be very large (such as 100,000lbs per run) and
completely unnecessary as it is perfectly acceptable to ship 1lb less than order size.
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Instantiating net new production disrupts other production runs, steals capacity and
materials – schedule quality is inevitably diminished.
A feature has been added to Production Scheduling to be able to essentially “shut off”
any PS created net new production suggestions to avoid these situations.
With this flag enabled, there will be no net new production recommendations generated
at any level in the BOM (i.e. only work order supply production will be scheduled). If
there is insufficient work order supply, inventory will be automatically added to prevent
levels from falling below zero (i.e. Demand is permitted to be shorted). A PS log
message is generated to indicate what inventory quantity adjustments were made.
Utilizing this feature assumes work order supply is sufficient to meet demand.
3.17.3.5. Control Application of Purchase Item Order Multiples beyond Lead Time
Items marked as “Purchased” in Production Scheduling must be associated with a source
of supply (i.e. a Supplier) and a corresponding order multiple must be modeled. It is key
to note that Production Scheduling is not intended to plan procurement specifically, but
to be constrained by lead time only. Beyond lead time, supply for these purchased items
is essentially unconstrained – therefore the purchase item multiple is not especially
relevant. However, customers do find these order multiples to be useful for various
types of modeling approaches.
A feature has been added to be able to control whether or not purchase item multiples are
respected beyond supplier lead time or not. Keeping these “relaxed” helps solve
performance and is generally recommended.
In the PS Plan Solver Options, there is a flag entitled “Relax Purchase Items beyond
Lead Time”. Default is set to ‘Yes”.
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When this flag is enabled, the order multiple is internally set to a very large value and
effectively ignored beyond lead time – one will see the addition of a new red line in the
item graph to represent the time of the item. Beyond the lead time, the item graph is
shaded to indicate infinite supply.
If the flag is set to “No”, the item graph is displayed taking into account the order
multiples.
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3.17.3.6. Improved Operation Status Logic in OPM integration
If an OPM Batch Operation has a “firm start” resource but is still in pending state, the PS
integration code was previously interpreting this operation as Active when importing into
Production Scheduling.
The corresponding PS integration code has been modified to read this new status from
this new column to set an operation as Open, Active or Closed in Production Scheduling.
This release provides new work order filtering capabilities which allows planners to
further “slice and dice” data in the various Gantt, Utilization, and Pegging views in a
multi-dimensional fashion and filter the content of these views. This feature allows the
planner to hone in on specific areas of the schedule only – for example “show me all
work orders in from October 25 – November 5 running on Resource (or Group) which
have a Firm Start status”. The results are previewed in the bottom of the filtering view
and planners can drill-down to the Work Order Editor directly from here as well if
desired.
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A new “Work Order Filter” view has been added to PS which is accessible off of the
toolbar.
Selecting the icon launch the filtering window. The user then inputs criteria. Selecting
“OK” will filter out the various Gantt Charts.
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You can create as many filters as you like which are specific for various analysis
purposes and even save them locally as a file (and send to your colleagues).
This is a very useful feature which provides a very advanced level of filtering capability
into an already rich user interface.
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• Consideration of Visit priorities
• Maintenance exceptions
• Inventory reservations
• What is the total Machine, Labor, and Tool utilization across visits?
• What is the total Machine, Labor, and Tool utilization for a specific visit?
• How much of the utilization is associated with routine vs. non-routine work?
• What is the average visit duration by visit type (e.g., Programmed Depot
Maintenance, Engine Overhaul)?
Standard collections options have now been included to collect this information as
shown below.
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Only Visits in Planning, Implemented, and Partially Implemented statuses are considered
in the schedule.
Visit Priorities are used by the scheduling engine to prioritize Visits competing for
scarce resources. When conflicts arise the schedule is governed by the following criteria
in order:
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1. Visit Request Date
2. Visit Priorities
3. Work Order Priorities
4. Work Order Request Date
For example, when two Visits have the exact same Request Date, the Visit with the
higher priority will take precedence on scarce resources.
Contextual drilldowns from the Exceptions is provided. A key drilldown to the Critical
Path aids the scheduler in analyzing why a Visit is late. This is described in more detail
in the next section.
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Tasks on the Critical Path are highlighted in yellow and tasks that are not critical to the
Visit may be hidden.
The operation slack time for tasks not on the critical path is also indicated by red lines
attached to the operations, as shown below. This visual indicator of slack informs the
scheduler of the amount an operation can move before it will then become a part of the
critical path.
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3.17.4.5. Maintenance Key Performance Indicators
One of the key features of Production Scheduling is the ability to quickly run ‘what-if’
scenarios to see improvements to the plan. Instrumental to this process is the ability to
compare key performance metrics across scenarios. Unique maintenance exceptions
have been added to the existing KPI view.
In addition to the above KPI’s, direct comparisons across two scenarios are available to
show Visits or Milestones that:
• Were On-Time, Now Late
• Were Late, Now On-Time
• Were Late, Less Late
• Were Late, More Late
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3.17.4.6. Inventory Reservations
Inventory Reservations made in the cMRO marshalling workbench are now respected in
Production Scheduling. The following inventory reservations are supported:
• On-Hand Inventory to a Sales Order
• Work Order to Work Order reservations
• Internal Requisition to Work Order
Inventory Reservations tabs have been added to all supply and demand type views within
Production Scheduling.
The above example shows a work order which has now a Supply reservation and
Demand reservation tab since a work order can be both a supply and demand. This
reservation is respected during schedule generation.
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This work order relationship is now visualized on the Production Pegging Gantt by the
Red Lines shown below.
This visual indication of related tasks applies to any related work orders and is not
limited to the maintenance solution.
• Closed. When an operation has completed as indicated by the Actual Start Date
and Actual Completion Date
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• Active. When an operation has started, but not completed as indicated by the
Actual Start Date
• Zero Duration. When the actual time exceeds the planned time. For example,
the planned time for an operation is 1hr but after 1.5 hrs it is still not completed.
New Visualizations have been added to easily distinguish the different statuses within
the Production Pegging View.
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these assets and can track the asset using meters, quality plans, and condition monitoring
systems allowing companies to formulate effective preventative maintenance strategies.
Prior to 12.1.3.7, a resource that was scheduled for maintenance in EAM could be
considered by specifying a simulation set in the Plan Options providing the engine with
the capability to consider the planned availability of the resource when generating a
schedule. This consideration is not sufficient when common resources and materials are
shared between complex maintenance activities, such as those managed by CMRO, and
asset maintenance managed by EAM. For example, some maintenance crew might have
the training and skill set to perform maintenance tasks on an aircraft as part of a Visit
(CMRO) as well as an Asset (EAM). The schedule must account for these shared
resources when generating the maintenance schedule for Visits for release back to
CMRO.
This feature will import EAM work orders to consider the pre-determined preventative
maintenance activities managed in EAM while generating the Production Schedule. It is
important to note that the maintenance schedule is currently managed in Oracle EAM’s
Maintenance Scheduler which considers factors important and unique to Enterprise
Asset Management that are not considered by Production Scheduling such as usage,
meter readings, or calendar days. For example, an aircraft tow tractor may need
maintenance after every 200 Motor hours or 6 months - whichever comes first. Since
Production Scheduling does not understand these important concepts it cannot
effectively schedule, or re-schedule maintenance work orders. The goal of this
integration is to have Production Scheduling respect the EAM maintenance schedule and
take into consideration the resource downtime of the maintenance resource, common
resources and common materials required to perform CMRO and EAM maintenance
activities. The EAM maintenance schedule will still be generated and managed in
EAM.
Consideration of Oracle EAM work orders in the maintenance schedule will provide the
following benefits:
A new EAM work order type has been added to the Production Scheduling views:
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Production Scheduling will schedule non-EAM work orders around this maintenance
activity and schedule around this work. Since EAM work orders are treated implicitly as
Firm the scheduling engine will not move this work order during scheduling and can
cause inventory to fall below zero and resources to be overloaded. Manual scheduling
changes can be made to the EAM work orders to adjust these exceptions and published
back to EAM.
EAM work orders are indicated in purple in the various Gantt views with the downtime
of the asset indicated by a thin purple line.
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The merge operations toolbar which merges operations in the Gantt charts will also
merge contiguous operations in the Resource Sequence view to simplify the manual
scheduling process.
In addition the re-sequence and drag and drop capabilities that have been carried
forward, the new view presents additional functionality including:
• The introduction of changeovers in the view
• Contextual drilldowns from the rows to work orders and demands
• Ability to edit operation dates and firm status
• Ability to copy and paste the information from the table to Excel
• Additional fields listed below
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3.17.4.11. Shift Utilization Reporting
Shift definitions from EBS are now imported to allow the scheduler to view Resource
Utilization by shift. A new ‘Shift Pattern’ calendar type has been added to the
application which is assigned to resources per the EBS Resource setup screens.
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The Resource Utilization view can now report by shift including shift overlaps. The
shift selection is dependent on the Resource and is consistent with the assignment on the
source system.
User defined colors can now be associated to specific attribute values providing the
scheduler with a quick visual sequence of the schedule based on attributes.
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As with attributes, the color definition is not possible in the source system so may
require a custom extension to persist across planning sessions.
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Work Order Units of Effort Highlighting
Work order jobs can be broken into logical pieces by the scheduling engine as
determined by the lot multiple when Units of Effort is enabled. This is especially true
for Batch resources where a Work Order can be run in consecutive batches. Selecting an
operation will now also highlight related operation instances in the same work order as
illustrated in the graphic below.
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Deploy Work Order Folders in Production Pegging View
Due to the large number of potential work orders, the Production Pegging view’s folders
are collapsed by default. The scheduler may want to expand certain folders or sub-
folders to view all the work orders within a specific logical group. A right-click menu
options is now available which will expand all folders under the selected group to auto-
expand the view to the Folder or Work Order level.
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Advanced Work Order Filtering Fields
Additional fields have been added to the recently added work order filter screen to allow
the scheduler to filter by Visit Attributes such as Visit Type or Priority.
The Gantt views can also be filtered by the newly added Shift Calendars for jobs that are
• Starting in a Shift
• Ending in a Shift
• Running during a Shift
With the additional fields, a new layout has been adopted that groups the filter criteria in
logical groups.
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3.17.4.13. Improved Treatment of Firm Work Orders
In previous versions, the scheduling engine sometimes moved firm work orders to avoid
capacity, material, or precedence relationship violations. However, many customers
wanted the work orders to remain firm, for business reasons not visible to the scheduling
engine. Firm work orders will now be respected within the fixed time fence regardless
of the violations mentioned above. The implication of this is that inventory levels can
fall below zero or capacity violations can exist but is often acceptable due to the reasons
mentioned above. Calendar constraints are still respected.
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3.17.4.14. Visibility to Maintenance Visit Status
This feature builds on our Asset Intensive Planning solution from the previous release
enables you to display and easily identify complex maintenance visits in a Planning,
Partially Implemented, or Implemented status. Distinguishing between the different visit
statuses is important, especially in scheduling non-routine work orders which typically
account for two-thirds of the work in a visit. A new status field has been added to the
visit header. This can be filtered against in the various Gantt views.
Oracle Production Scheduling has historically been very strong at addressing complex
production scheduling problems in discrete environments. Many routing steps with
complex temporal relationships, alternate resources, and supporting resource constraints
are handled very well. However, within some process manufacturing environments, for
example Food & Beverage or Personal Care Products Manufacturing, Production
Scheduling currently produces inadequate schedules.
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• One production stage manufactures bulk WIP items, usually in batch-based
production, often involving tanks. These resources are referred to as ‘Upstream
Resources’. This stage corresponds to the Make stage.
• A second production stage consumes bulk WIP items and delivers a variety of
finished goods on packaging lines, which are referred to as ‘Downstream
Resources’. Consequently, one bulk WIP item can be converted into several
finished products. Package type, package size, or labels are variations of finished
products. This stage corresponds to the Pack stage.
• The two key production stages are decoupled via bulk WIP inventory. Typically,
there is limited buffer storage available, for example via hold tanks in front of
the packaging lines, which allows balancing production rate variations between
the stages. While synchronous production and consumption with near zero
buffers between the stages does occur, it is rare, and it is not a use case targeted
by this enhancement.
• Batch sizes on the upstream resources may vary; for example, tanks with
different sizes are involved. This corresponds to alternate routings.
• The bulk WIP consumption rates usually vary on the downstream resources,
since package type and size have an impact: Filling small portion control
packages generally consumes less bulk WIP inventory per hour than filling large
bottles.
• While there may be further upstream and downstream stages (e.g. premix ahead
of mix, and palletizing & shrink-wrapping after packing), these stages are
usually not constraining from a scheduling perspective. Schedule generation
therefore focuses on the two key stages.
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• Synchronize the production and consumption of bulk WIP items by scheduling
the upstream make and downstream pack operations close together from a time
perspective.
• Minimize changeovers in both stages, with higher relevance for the downstream
packaging stage.
• Work orders: Generally, work orders will be present for the downstream pack
stage, but not for the upstream make stage. If work orders shall be included in
the upstream stage, then one work order per batch is required to provide
flexibility to optimize, i.e. each make work order should have only one operation
instance.
The PS 12.2.4 solution approach to address the synchronization of the upstream make
and downstream pack stages involves several features:
• New Resource Relationship Editor: This editor allows the user to specify the
aspects listed under Resource Connectivity above. The resource relationships
can be maintained on the VCP Server in a new editor, accessed from the
Production Scheduler responsibility. Within PS, the editor looks as follows:
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The Resource Relationship Editor has 4 columns:
o Direct Only: If the Direct Only flag is checked, then this indicates that
the respective downstream resource must not be fed indirectly, for
example via totes. As a consequence, the solver will not consume any
starting inventory on such resource, and will always have to schedule an
upstream operation that provides the bulk WIP item. Note that if Direct
Only is checked for a downstream resource in any one row, then this will
apply to all jobs scheduled on such resource.
o Rank: The lower the value, the more relevant synchronization is.
Downstream resources, which have to be fed directly (Direct Only=Yes),
will implicitly be considered most important, independent of the Rank
value. Downstream resource, which can only be fed indirectly via totes,
would typically have the highest Rank values, corresponding to the
lowest relevance.
Some rules:
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Resource Relationship Editor with a high Rank value (corresponding to
a lower relevance).
• New Algorithm: If the Solver Option ‘Build Strategy’ is set to ‘Pre-Build’ and
the ‘Pre-build Policy’ is set to ‘Multistage Synchronization’, then the new
algorithm will be applied.
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exception is provided.
• Typical Tank Scheduling features are not addressed in this enhancement. Some
examples include: Batch ranges, using processing tanks as storage tanks, or
modeling several operations with different rates for filling the tank, processing,
QC time, and draining the tank.
• Shelf Life and Minimum Remaining Shelf Life: These aspects are not
considered. The synchronization goal is to minimize the consumption times
between the two main stages. Exceptions will be generated when consumption
time targets are violated.
• The Repair Solve used as part of manual scheduling in the schedule views
implements schedule changes as directed by the user, for example cut & paste or
re-sequencing of multiple operations, if model constraints allow that. However,
if constraints are violated, then a desired manual schedule change is reversed, or
implemented in a different manner.
• Finally, after a manual schedule change, the schedule cannot be published unless
the Repair Solve is executed.
In PS 12.2.4 a new manual scheduling mode with these key features is available:
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• Publishing the schedule will be possible even if certain constraints are violated,
although changeovers will be excluded from publish, since they are not
meaningful anymore once capacity violations are present.
• Capacity constraints: All capacity constraints are relaxed in this mode and can be
violated. Exceptions will be generated.
• Material constraints: All material constraints are relaxed and can be violated.
Exceptions will be generated.
The Unconstrained Manual Scheduling mode is activated via a new toolbar button.
The window frames will appear in green color to indicate to the user that he is now
in Unconstrained Manual Scheduling mode.
Many customers appreciate the Resource Sequence view. All jobs on a given resource
are listed in a tabular format with key information. Re-Sequencing the jobs in this view,
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or drilling down to model objects is possible. The following changes to this view in PS
12.2.4 further improve its usability and will make the scheduling process more efficient:
• Additional Fields: New fields were added, providing relevant information to the
scheduler. The following screenshot shows the fields now available.
• Indication of Lateness via Red Color: Using red font for late work orders
and/or late demands, which an operation is pegged to, enables the user to
identify issues more quickly.
• Date Change Indicator: If the Start Time of two successive rows falls on
different days, then a solid line is used to indicate such date change to the user.
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• Toggle on/off Changeover Display: When in Operation Merge mode, and
assuming a changeover is necessary between any two different operations, then
every second row displayed in this view is a changeover row.
While changeover information is very relevant for scheduling, in some cases the
user is less interested in changeovers, but more in the actual jobs and their
sequence. Via a new toggle button, the user is now able to easily show or hide
the changeover rows.
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• Filter by Item Attributes: It is now possible to specify work order filters using
item attributes.
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This behavior is controlled via settings in Tools | Options | Global Settings.
Oracle Production Scheduling has always had exception messages, which alert the user
about various problems. For example, the user has the ability to use drill-downs to
schedule views or the work order editor in order to investigate and try to resolve a
specific issue.
o Item Attributes
o Object Properties.
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o Violation Duration (All Exceptions)
In PS 12.2.4 the reverse is possible. The user can highlight all producing and/or
consuming operations in the Resource Gantt from an item in the Item Graph. Being able
to identify these producing and consuming operations is useful in various situations, for
example when products are run in cyclical manner multiple times over the schedule
horizon, when a product is run concurrently on multiple resources, and to see how well
production and consumption is synchronized.
New right-mouse menu options and tool-bar buttons are provided. Producing operations
are shown in brown, consuming operations in magenta.
The new Merge Work Order Operation mode merges such operation instances only if
they belong to the same work order. Further, if a work order requires multiple routing
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instances and some operation instances are scheduled with separation (idle time) in
between, then they are still merged, with the idle time indicated via a grey shading.
• For Supply Event (e.g. purchase order): The drill-down leads to the supply event
line item in the Supply & Demand Editor.
• For On Hand: The drill-down leads to the Item Properties page, tab On Hand.
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3.17.5.11. Middle-Mouse Button Draws Vertical Line in Schedule Views
Pressing the middle-mouse button enables the scheduler to see a thin vertical line in the
schedule views. This line provides a quick way to see how related upstream and
downstream operations and their timing align with one another, without having to
constantly use the zoom in/out functionality.
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3.17.5.12. Work Order Mass Change of Firm Status
The Work Order Mass Change now also allows changing the Firm Status of work orders
on the header level, and the Firm Status and the Firm Start/End Dates of work order
operations.
3.17.5.14. New Where Used Tab in Shared Storage Space Properties Page
The properties page of shared storages now contains a Where Used tab in which all the
items that are assigned to this shared storage space are listed.
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3.17.5.15. New Solver Options: Scheduling Bucket and Pre-build Policy
In PS 12.2.4, the Solver Options window has been reorganized, now featuring three tabs
General, Schedule Strategy, and Campaign Run Optimization.
In tab General, a new “Scheduling Bucket” can be specified. This value specifies the
time interval over which demand/operations should be grouped for the multi-stage
synchronization algorithm. It is used to balance changeover optimization against desired
run size and service levels.
In tab Schedule Strategy three different pre-build policies can be selected: Balanced,
Dynamic Resource Allocation, and Multistage Synchronization
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• Balanced: This pre-build policy corresponds to the only pre-build mode available
in PS 12.1.3.
• Dynamic Resource Allocation: This pre-build mode allows more aggressive pre-
building and typically results in better resource allocation patterns. In this mode
the solver can be directed to choose resources using earliest completion time or
least changeover plus idle time optimization strategies.
The Tools | Options dialog, tab Global Settings, now contains the ability to specify
criteria for when the solver should stop. This can be based on a given time limit or a
certain number of backtracks.
When the solver stops because it reached the stop criteria or the user pressed the solver
stop button, then the application now displays the incomplete schedule at time of solver
stop. Not all necessary decisions are made by the solver at that point time, and various
constraints will be violated. Since such schedule is infeasible, the schedule window
frame will be displayed in red color, and the schedule cannot be published.
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3.17.5.17. Display Item Code and Description
If non-intelligent item numbering is in place, then the item code consists of a number,
which usually is meaningless to the user.
In the Tools | Options dialog, tab Global Settings, the user can now configure how items
are to be displayed in the various areas of the application. Any combination of item code
and item description is possible, displaying information that is meaningful to the user.
The display of items in the Item Graph, Item Gantt, and in bubble-help windows in the
various schedule views will adhere to these settings.
The Oracle Alta UI Look and Feel has been incorporated into the latest Production
Scheduling release. While providing a consistent look with other Oracle applications it
provides a cleaner design and more padding to minimize data clutter and a visually
pleasing user interface to review application data. The padding has been incorporated in
the tables and Gantt views which can be configured to accommodate different user
preferences.
You can revert to the legacy look and feel, as it does allow you to view more data on the
screen and minimize scrolling. This can be controlled by changing the theme in Tools ->
Options. The available themes are:
• PS Classic
• 256 Colors. Provides some benefits while using some remote access technologies
such as remote desktop.
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Within a theme, the various UI elements can be configured to further refine the look and
feel such as the padding around the data tables to increase, or decrease the data density.
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Less padding presents more data on screen and requires less scrolling.
In previous releases, a custom hooks have existed to augment and modify inbound data
going into the application. In this release, on the outbound, or publish process, custom
hooks are now available so that you can customize the information being passed to the
source system. In the diagram below, Steps 17 and 19 have been added to modify the
data prior to updating the Planning Data Store (PDS) and also after loading the PDS
tables but before calling the source system API (i.e. WIP_MASS_LOAD). In both
cases, customizations are possible to accommodate customer specific business
requirements.
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Publish Connector Script (17): Prior to loading the data to PDS, a script can be called
to make modifications to the XML data or call any other script. This script is
OPTIONAL.
Script before calling API to update source system (19): Prior to calling the API to
update the source system (i.e. WIP_MASS_LOAD_API) a script can be called to insert
any necessary customizations. This script is OPTIONAL.
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3.18. Oracle Rapid Planning
3.18.1. Product Overview
Oracle Rapid Planning is a fast, heuristic based engine that generates supply chain plans
that span the enterprise manufacturing and distribution networks covering the supply
chain from supplies to customers. Rapid Planning delivers fast, comprehensive plans
that respect material and resource capacity constraints.
Oracle Rapid Planning provides users an ability to simulate and quickly evaluate impacts
of various changes in demand and supply conditions. It allows planners to evaluate the
consequences of these changes and also compare and contrast various alternative courses
of action based upon user configurable metrics.
Rapid Planning leverages the integration capabilities of the Value Chain Planning suite
which means it can be deployed and integrated out-of-the-box with Oracle E-Business
Suite or with heterogeneous back-end systems. Rapid Planning is integrated with Oracle
E-Business Suite R12.1 and R11i10. Rapid Planning utilizes the proven Advanced
Planning collections architecture to integrate your source system reference and
transaction data to the Rapid Planning engine.
Rapid Planning supports input of simulation changes to master data like items, resources,
bills of materials, routing operations in two ways:
• Change the master data inside a particular plan and re-solve
• Change the master data in a simulation set for repetitive use in more than one
plan
The planning engine can be invoked in three different modes
• With snapshot and complete replan
• Without snapshot, but complete replan
• Without snapshot, but replan only incremental changes
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3.18.2.3. Simulation Sets
Oracle Rapid Planning makes simulations very easy through the powerful feature of
simulation sets. A simulation set is a collection of changes to the attributes of any of the
following master data entities.
• Items
• End Item Substitution relationships
• Resources
• Routings and operations
• Routing Operation Networks
• Bill of Materials, components and substitutes
• Resource Availability
• Manufacturing Order Resource Requirements
• Manufacturing Order Operation Networks
• Calendars
• Supplier capacity
This feature enables planners to do “what-if” analysis without having to make these
changes permanent or without the need to make these changes in the source ERP systems
and re-collect to see their impacts. This saves a lot of time and effort for the planners.
These simulation sets can then be referenced in different plans through a plan option.
This feature is supported for almost all entities like items, resources, supplies, demands,
etc. Users can update using various operators like “set value to”, “increase by”,
“decrease by”, “increase by %”, “decrease by %”, etc.
Users can undo the simulation changes at an attribute-level by using “set value to
original” operator to revert to the original value.
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3.18.2.6. Aggregate, Editable Material Horizontal View
The application supports a material plan with a layout wizard that lets the users to
customize the layout including the measures displayed, time granularity, etc. Users can
also specify two aggregation levels from a choice of Organization, Product Category,
Product Family and Item.
The aggregations are done real-time and take into account all current user changes,
firming, etc.
Users can also update the aggregate level horizontal plans. For example, users can update
forecast quantity at the product category or even at a period level. The system will
allocate the updates to individual items and days.
Users can also focus on a single order upstream or downstream and then reverse
direction to look at the “where-used” or the opposite views. They can then retrace the
steps back to original state of the supply/demand view
The Advanced Planning Command Center’s Supply Chain Analyst dashboard supports
drill-down directly into the Rapid Planning Application.
All Rapid Planning Simulation plans can be used in the Process Automation
functionality to build process flows in Advanced Planning Command Center.
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3.18.2.10. Constrained Planning
Rapid Planning offers a full set of constrained planning features. Rapid Planning
performs simultaneous material and resource capacity constraint based planning. Rapid
Planning output is constrained by purchasing, distribution and transit lead times, by
resource calendars and capacities, and by supplier capacity. Rapid Planning calculates
the capacities consumed by existing WIP schedules and purchased supplies and allocates
the remaining capacity to new planned orders.
Constrained planning allows planners to automate many types of planning decisions and
focus on the critical issues. Rapid Planning constraint based planning includes the
ability to search among many alternate supply types. Rapid Planning can automatically
search for and find alternates and substitutes across the supply chain and create planned
orders to meet demands on time. When the primary supply source is late, Rapid Planning
searches for the entire supply chain for item substitutes, alternate organizations, alternate
suppliers, alternate BOM and routing, alternate resources and substitute components to
locate the supply source that provides the delivery date closest the demand due date.
The forecast consumption features allow the planner to include both forecasts and actual
sales orders without double counting demand. Planners can select the enforce demand
time fence plan option and forecasts inside the demand time fence are not included as
demands in the plan.
During plan definition, the planner can select forecast spreading option. For example, if
the forecast is a weekly forecast, the planner can choose to spread the forecast to daily
buckets and also optionally set the forecast consumption forward and backward day
controls. This allows the planner to accept aggregate (weekly or period) forecasts and
more accurately plan supplies in daily buckets.
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3.18.2.14. Supply Chain Sourcing
Rapid Planning is compatible with the sourcing rules, bills of distribution and
assignment sets used by Oracle Purchasing or upload supply chain sourcing definitions
via file loaders. Sourcing rules and bills of distribution determine the movement of
materials between organizations in your global enterprise; these organizations include
your suppliers and the materials include those items made at the manufacturing
organizations.
Rapid Planning can select primary or alternate sources depending on supply constraints
to provide the best demand satisfaction dates. If Rapid Planning selects an alternate
organization to source an order, then the selection is reported by the exception message
“Order Sourced from Alternate Facility”.
You can specify item-supplier lead times and supplier capacity calendars. Rapid
Planning recognizes the item-supplier specific parameters and applies them as sources of
supply are evaluated to find supply that meets a demand on time. Users can also enter
item-supplier specific order modifiers.
The supplier capacity calendar governs how supplier capacity is accumulated over a
period of time. Supplier capacity is only accumulated on the working days according to
the supplier capacity calendar. The supplier capacity calendar also governs how the
supplier processing time is calculated.
If alternate bills of material are specified, then the alternate bill may be recommended if
there are supply constraints on the primary bill of material and routing. Alternate bills of
material selections are reported by the exception message “Planned Order uses Alternate
BOM/Routing”.
Rapid Planning respects BOM effectivity dates. The planning engine will calculate
component requirements based on the BOM effectivity date and also considering
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component effectivity dates. Rapid Planning evaluates the engineering change orders as
of their scheduled effective date. You can order material and plan resources that you
need for new revisions ahead of time.
You can specify simultaneous resources and set the maximum assigned units for each
resource requirement to control scheduling results. Resource efficiency and utilization
are used by Rapid Planning resource requirement calculations.
If you can specify alternate resources, Rapid Planning selects alternates and schedules
around constraints on primary resources to meet demands on time. Rapid Planning also
chooses alternate routings when required because of constraints on the primary BOM
and routing. Alternate selections reported with the exception messages “Planned Order
uses Alternate Resource” and “Planned Order uses Alternate BOM/Routing”.
Rapid Planning respects routing effectivity dates. Resource requirements are generated
using routings which are effective on the start date of the planned order.
Planners can select certain bottleneck resources to perform constrained planning. Other
resources are planned in an unconstrained mode using the resource lead time during
scheduling. Rapid Planning creates schedules that do not overload the selected
bottleneck resources and reports overloads on the non-bottleneck resources. This allows
the planner to focus on the critical bottleneck resources.
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defined at the item organization level which allows the user to freeze the schedule during
the initial periods of the plan.
The shipping calendar indicates the valid working days for shipment activities
originating from suppliers and organizations. The planning engine does not recommend a
shipment out from those facilities if the date is a non-working day.
The receiving calendar governs the receiving activities at the organizations or customer
sites that receive goods. The planning engine allows organizations to receive shipments
only on a working day.
The carrier calendar indicates the working and non-working days and times for material
that is in transit using different means of transport. For example, certain methods of
shipment such as parcel carriers may not work on weekends. This may cause the transit
time to be stretched over the weekends.
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3.18.2.25. Planner Action: Firm Planned Supplies
Planners can review new planned make and buy orders while comparing to the pegged
demands. When required, the planner can pull in or push out the new planned orders and
selectively firm the planned orders. Rapid Planning respects the firm flag by not
changing the schedule dates and by consuming material and resource capacity before
scheduling non-firm supplies. Rapid Planning reports any overload situations caused by
firm planned orders.
New planned make orders are released with an alternate BOM/Routing recommendation.
If Rapid Planning selects substitute components and alternate resources, these selections
are also be released as part of the make order.
Rapid Planning allows the user to specify the auto-release of planned orders within the
release time fence. Users can set the release time as the item organization attribute.
Auto-release of planned orders occurs immediately after the Rapid Planning plan
processes complete.
Rapid Planning release processes are fully integrated with Oracle Purchasing and Order
WIP. The release processes also allow for integration to third party systems.
3.18.2.27. Exceptions
Rapid Planning generates the following 24 exception types, and are displayed within the
"Exceptions" view in Rapid Planning.
• Past Due Sales Orders
• Late Replenishment for Sales Order
• Late Replenishment for Forecast
• Demand Quantity Not Satisfied
• Resource Overloaded
• Exception: Supplier Capacity Overloaded
• Items with a Shortage
• Items below Safety Stock
• Items with Excess Inventory
• Past Due Orders
• Orders to be rescheduled out
• Orders to be cancelled
• Orders to be rescheduled in
• Order with Insufficient Lead Time
• Sales Order/Forecast at Risk due to a resource shortage
• Sales Order/Forecast at Risk due to material shortage
• Late Supply pegged to Forecast
• Late supply pegged to Sales Order
• Planned Order uses alternate BOM/Routing
• Planned Order uses Substitute Component
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• Planned Order uses Alternate Resource
• Order Sourced from Alternate Facility
• Order sourced from Alternate Supplier
• Demand Satisfied Using End Item Substitution
Exceptions are generated only when a plan run has completed, and are not regenerated
when manual edits are made to a plan.
Users can choose to enable or disable the display of specific exception types, and specify
their arrangement within the Exceptions view through a configuration mechanism.
Within an exception type, users can specify search criteria or filters to specify the
exceptions that must be displayed. Search criteria can be saved with a user specified
name for future use.
From an exception, navigation to other related Rapid Planning views has been provided
in context of the exception’s attributes (Item, Org, Resource, etc). Exceptions generated
in Rapid Planning can be exported to MS Excel for further analysis.
When Plan Comparison is enabled in Rapid Planning, exceptions for the base plan and
compared plan for an exception type are displayed in adjacent tabs. The name of the
exception type also has the name of the associated plan to easily identify which plan the
listed exceptions belong to.
In addition to the above metrics, Rapid Planning can also display different facts (Count,
Quantity, Value, etc) for the supported exception types as metrics.
Selection of the metrics that must be displayed, their display levels, associated filter
conditions, and their layout within the Analytics view can be configured at a user level.
In a Plan Comparison mode, values from both the base and the compared plans are
shown together for easy visibility and comparison.
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The Analytics view also enables the comparison of end order satisfaction across two
plans within an Order Comparison region. To easily compare end demands planned
differently across the base and compared plans, seeded comparison mechanisms (e.g.
“Was On Time, Now Late”) are provided. Search capabilities are also provided to
restrict the comparison to a user defined selection.
For every late demand, Rapid Planning will report the following types of constraints:
• Material Constraint
o Lead Time Constraint
o Planning Time Fence Constraint
o Date Effectivity Constraint
o WIP Window Constraint
• Resource Constraint
• Supplier Constraint
These constraints will be reported along all alternate paths: alternate resources on
routings, substitute components on bills of material, alternate bills of material and
routings, alternate sources on sourcing rules, and end item substitutes.
Each constraint will have information such as requested date, requested quantity,
available quantity, shortage (both in absolute quantity and percentage terms) so that
planners can immediately see what actions to take to resolve each late fulfillment of a
demand.
You can use sourcing rules to distribute consumed global forecasts to appropriate
shipment organizations. Forecast distribution is performed in an unconstrained manner
based on the user defined percentages in the sourcing rules. Rapid Planning issues
exception messages when a distributed forecast demand at an organization cannot be met
on time by supply in that organization.
Single level and multi-level ATO models are supported by Rapid Planning. Multi-level
ATO models include models at lower levels of the BOM structure. Configured to order
sales orders consume model forecasts at each level of the multi-level model. Rapid
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Planning will plan for the unconsumed model, option and option class forecasts as well
as planning for the configured items. Supplies are scheduled and created as needed for
all lower levels.
You can provide pre-exploded forecast values of your ATO and PTO models and
components to Rapid Planning. Configured sales orders consume the model and lower
level forecasts. Rapid Planning supports forecast consumption at various levels such as
customer, customer site, zone (global forecasts), demand class, and item organization.
Rapid Planning can also optionally explode the forecast for the top level model. Model
forecasts are exploded to option, option class and component forecasts within Rapid
Planning using the 'Explode Forecast' plan option. After forecast explosion, Rapid
Planning will consume and plan supplies for the unconsumed forecast demand at each
level.
Rapid Planning distributes global forecasts for ATO and PTO models across
organizations based on the user-specified sourcing rule percentages. The global forecasts
can be consumed at different levels such as Global (Item), Organization, Customer,
Customer Site, and Zone.
Rapid Planning plans only consider ATO sales orders after they have been progressed to
include a linked configured item. This allows Rapid Planning to schedule these sales
orders with all the capabilities provided for standard items - for example, to net existing
supplies of pre-configured stock at any supply chain bill of material level.
A forecast for a lower level ATO configuration that will be stocked will be consumed by
a sales order for the top level configured model. Rapid Planning will consume the
forecast for this specific configuration first. Any remaining demand will then consume
the forecast for the associated ATO model.
For procured configurations, Rapid Planning allows you to plan based on the aggregate
capacity of the supplier-supplier site to build the base model. A supplier capacity
statement for the ATO model is consumed by the ATO items that are created based on
this model. KPIs illustrating supplier capacity metrics, as well as exception messages are
provided to help you make an informed decision.
Users can override the default order sizing algorithm by specifying a new item-
organization attribute called planning unit of work. The user can set planning unit of
work to the number of hours for the duration of the maximum order size. For example,
set planning unit of work to 8 hours and the resulting new planned orders will not exceed
8 hour shifts in duration.
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User can set the planning unit of work to larger than daily capacities and Rapid Planning
will create new planned orders that typically span several days up to the specified
planning unit of work.
The default order sizing does not override existing item-organization order modifiers.
For example, if the fixed order quantity is specified, then all order sizes equal fixed order
quantity without regard to the planning unit of work. Default order sizing is only applied
to new planned orders and does not affect the quantity of an existing supply.
Rapid Planning generates pegging of on-hand supply to sales orders that matches the
reservations recorded in the source transaction system. In the supply and demand
window, each sales order demand includes a new field which displays the quantity of on
hand inventory that is reserved to the sales order.
Rapid Planning provides visibility to the Clear to Build status of Make Orders, both at
the individual make order level as well as at aggregate levels through new key
performance indicators (KPIs). The Clear to Build status on make orders are visible
through new order level attributes: “Clear to Build Status”, “Ready to Build %”, “Clear
to Build Date”, and “Clear to Build Component Availability %”. Equivalent KPIs can be
configured to view these attributes at aggregate levels.
Rapid Planning also allows user to control allocation of scarce on-hand component
supply to make orders by explicitly prioritizing or de-prioritizing specific make orders.
This can be achieved through a new Rapid Planning view called the Clear to Build
Dashboard. The dashboard allows a user to:
• Search for the make orders for which the user wants the Clear to Build status to
be improved;
• Prioritize specific make orders for Clear to Build – this results in on-hand being
allocated to these make orders preferentially when the plan is launched next;
• View contentions for selected make orders – contentions are other make orders
that share common components; these make orders could potentially contribute
to the improvement of the clear to build status of the target orders;
• Selectively de-prioritize certain make orders from allocation of on-hand – these
selected orders will be given lower priority when on-hand is allocated to Make
Orders in the next plan run;
• View how a specific component is allocated to multiple make orders, and
prioritize or de-prioritize make orders for on-hand allocation based on this
component allocation view.
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3.18.2.35. Rapid Planning – Sales and Operations Planning Integration
Rapid Planning plans will be visible in Demantra Real-time Sales and Operations
Planning. The integration between Rapid Planning and Real-time Sales and Operations
Planning is similar to the existing Advanced Supply Chain Planning to Real-time Sales
and Operations Planning integration. You can export consensus forecast data from Real-
time Sales and Operations Planning to Rapid Planning plan. You can read the supply
data from a Rapid Planning plan back into Real-time Sales and Operations Planning.
This data from the Rapid Planning plan will now be visible in Real-time Sales and
Operations Planning worksheets.
24 by 7 ATP is not enabled against Rapid Planning plans. Also, any inserts that GOP
makes into the plan (Sales Orders, Planned Orders, etc.) will not be visible within the
Rapid Planning plan itself. Any Rapid Planning plan that is enabled for ATP will not be
editable. This avoids inconsistencies between the current output of the Rapid Planning
plan and the version against which GOP is promising orders.
A search region allows users to query up only sales orders of interest – for example,
sales orders for specific items, or sales orders at specific organizations.
Multiple planners can thus work on simulation copies of a base plan and save the results
of their simulation to a common simulation set. When the base plan is launched again
with reference to this simulation set, all the user changes will be considered in the next
version of the Rapid Planning plan.
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Functional Security
• This is the ability to dictate which functions (Create, Update / Edit, Delete,
Launch, Save, Close, Load, Copy, and Release) a responsibility should have
access to.
Data Security
• Data access can be controlled at two levels.
o Organization: Here, you can assign organizations to a responsibility.
Then, users with that responsibility will have access to (i) all Plans in
which the organizations exist and (ii) all items within those
organizations.
o Plan: A user creating a plan can mark the Plan as Private or Public. A
Public plan is accessible by all responsibilities (and, as a result, by all
users) provided they have the necessary Organization level security
granted. A Private plan is only accessible by specific users to whom
access has been granted (access is granted by the user who created the
plan and marked it as Private). In case of Private plans, users will have
access all items and organizations within that plan. However, the
actions the user can take are controlled by the Function Security of the
user’s responsibility.
3.18.3. Release 12.1.3+
This feature enables Rapid Planning to better utilize excess inventory and potentially
improve fill rates. It lets planners improve responsiveness by providing the ability to
improve to request date, but guarantee promise date / commit date.
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In the example illustrated above, a demand is initially committed for week 7. There is
excess inventory from weeks 3 to 6. If the customer comes up with a request to satisfy
the demand by week 2, Rapid Planning will now try to satisfy the demand on the feasible
date closest to the new request date, in this case week 3. In the cases where it cannot
improve the earlier commit date, the earlier commit date is preserved.
• Sales Order / Forecast Pulled in: Generated whenever the demand is satisfied
prior to the original demand satisfied date.
If a demand is partially met on a revised demand date and partially met on the earlier
commit date, both the above exceptions will be generated for that demand.
Based on the above two exceptions, Rapid Planning also generates the following new
measures for analysis that users can use to create graphs in the analytics tab of the Rapid
Planning workbench.
• Late Replenishment for a Pull-in Sales Order (Count, Value, Days, Quantity)
Based on the successful pull-ins, planners can now also release the changes to sales
orders from the workbench to the source system's Order Management application to send
the updates to quantity and the scheduled ship date.
They can access the lists from the left navigator pane and drill using an easy, single-click
navigation to Material/Resource Plans, Exceptions, Supplies and Demands for multiple
items, resources or suppliers.
Static Lists
Users can create a list with an enumerated list of items, resources and/or suppliers by
saving to a favorite list from other views in the workbench including Items, Resources,
Suppliers, and Supplies and Demands.
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Users can organize the order of the list to reflect supply chain structure by using move
up/down actions. This will enable navigation to the Material Plan that places items in
supply chain bill order: for example, assembly, sub-assembly, then components.
Dynamic Lists
Users can also create lists based on certain conditions that then construct the list
dynamically every time. For example, users can create a list based on a condition like
'Bottom 10 items based on fill rate %'. Users will then see the resultant list based on the
plan. Users can use any of the following measures to create these dynamic lists
• Fill Rate %
• Inventory Turns
• On time Orders %
• Resource Utilization %
• Purchasing Cost
Users can create these dynamic lists by creating a metric in the analytics tab using any of
the above measures with any of these applicable dimensions ("view by") - Item,
Organization, Resource or Supplier.
This enables Rapid Planning to be easily integrated with other applications that generate
safety stock quantity in units. It also provides an easy to understand view of supply and
demand that includes the safety stock (target and actual) expressed in quantity (units).
The safety stock lead time is calculated from the safety stock quantity using a simple
formula:
• Target Safety Stock: This is the time-phased safety stock quantity that is defined
by the user or collected from a source system.
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• Actual Safety Stock: This is the safety stock quantity that the plan has planned
for. Though the plan has actually planned using a safety lead time approach, it is
displayed in terms of quantity by converting the safety lead time into safety stock
quantity (not time phased) using the formula above.
Users can enable this behavior of deriving the safety stock lead time from the quantity
(instead from the safety stock %) using a new plan option called Safety Stock Lead Time
Method.
In addition to the above, users also have the option to input a non-time phased safety
stock quantity for each item using a new item attribute called 'Target Safety Stock
Override'.
• Selling Price
• Standard Cost
• Discount %
Users can edit these and see the impacts on plan recommendations and cost metrics after
running a simulation. Edits to Demand Time Fence Days and Release Time Fence Days
are only applicable in plan inputs mode using simulation sets. For all the above attributes
users can use the standard mass update features like Increase by, Decrease by, Increase
by %, Decrease by %, Set Value To, Reset to Original.
The impact of these user changes on the time fence attributes and the cost/price
attributes can be seen (after running the plan) on exceptions such as ‘Orders to be
Rescheduled In’ and measures such as Revenues and Gross Margin.
o Supplier Price
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• Supplier Capacity attributes
o From Date
o To Date
o Capacity
Users can simulate changes to these attributes in a specific plan or as part of a simulation
set that can be used across plans.
However, users cannot add a new Approved Supplier (Item-Supplier) entry that does not
already exist. Also this is still applicable only for global Approved Supplier Lists: any
update to a single org propagates to all orgs.
Users can view the impact of these simulation changes in all related measures. For
example, a what-if change to supplier price impacts related purchasing metrics.
• Operation Yield
• Resource
• Assigned Units
• Rate or Amount
Users can use these attributes to simulate changes to their manufacturing processes in a
specific plan or as part of a simulation set that can be used across plans.
Whenever the action results in the To Time being earlier than From Time, it will be
interpreted as a shift ending the next day. These mass update actions are available in both
plans and plan inputs.
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3.18.3.8. Mass Update Enhancements for Firm Date on Demands and Supplies
Mass updates to the field Firm Date now support additional operators: 'Decrease by',
'Increase by', 'Request Date+' and 'Suggested Due Date+'. The last two operators take a
positive or a negative number (say 'n') and set the Firm Date to 'n' days relative to the
Request Date or the Suggested Due Date. This lets users to do actions like firm all Sales
Order demands for an item to their respective request dates in a single update even
though the dates are all different.
All Date operations in this mass update are based on calendar (24x7) days and not
working days. These mass update actions are available in both plans and plan inputs.
While launching this program, users have the option to either calculate the lateness
constraints or not; and to save the plan (to the database), close the plan (in which case it
would not be immediately available for simulation), or do nothing (keep the plan
available for simulation). Plans launched in this mode are always launched with refresh
snapshot.
In addition, in the Material Plan and Resource Plan views, these two fields Item and
Resource have a new 'Among' operator where users can select multiple items or
resources to be displayed in the results.
This lets users to structure the Material Plan views in the same order as their supply
chain structure starting from the assembly all the way down to the components.
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• MSC: Max display decimals for Time
Profile option (3) above controls the display of all aggregate quantities especially in the
Material Plan and in Analytics, and profile option (4) above controls the display of all
aggregate time/hours in the Resource Plan and in Analytics. The rest of the profiles
control the display of decimals in all other views for the type of fields indicated above.
These profiles are only for display purposes and do not control the precision of the
internal values or the editable decimal precision.
With this release of Rapid Planning, the Material Plan has been enhanced to display
global forecasts. This provides users with the ability to view the original global forecast
quantities, forecast consumption and the distribution of the global forecasts to specific
organizations. The Material Plan view of global forecasts also shows the spreading of
forecasts to the various time buckets.
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Rapid Planning also supports the auto-release of reschedules and cancelations. This is
controlled with a new plan option, “Auto Release Reschedules.” The release time fence
item attribute also determines when auto release of reschedules and cancelations is
performed.
Simulation planning in Rapid Planning has been enhanced to work seamlessly with the
release of planned orders and reschedules. If recommendations are released, the
simulation plan ‘remembers’ what was released and does not create duplicate supplies.
As planners release planned orders and then simulate new conditions, the plan has a
record of what has already been released. The simulation plan treats the released plan
orders as firm supplies.
Two additional profile options are provided in the Advanced tab to extend the use of the
natural time fence. The option Firm Planned Order Time Fence instructs the planning
engine to create a natural time fence on the completion date of the latest firm planned
order. The option Firm Internal Requisition Time Fence instructs the planning engine to
create a natural time fence on the completion date of the latest firm internal requisition.
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• Was late, now more late
Earlier users had to view these sets of differences separately. Now the comparison page
supports search based on more than one comparison type.
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3.18.3.23. Flexible Consumption of Substitute Component Supplies
You can configure Rapid Planning to prefer consuming existing primary and substitute
component supplies before resorting to generating new planned orders. You can tell
Rapid Planning to consume existing supplies in either primary-then-substitute order or in
substitute-then-primary order. The search for existing supplies is not just at the level of
the end product components, but also extends upstream, resulting in preferential
consumption of existing supplies of subassembly components and raw materials. You
can exempt certain components from this search. This behavior is activated via the new
Component Substitution Logic plan option. This feature allows you to minimize excess
and obsolescence costs and manufacturing and purchasing costs via efficient use-up of
inventory and reductions in new production and procurement recommendations.
• When copying the supply orders from ASCP to Rapid Planning, all the supply
order details such as resource requirements, alternate resource selections,
material requirements, substitute component and alternate BOM selections, will
also be copied over from ASCP to Rapid Planning. This enhancement increases
the degree to which the Rapid Planning plan and the baseline ASCP plan are
aligned at the beginning of the simulation process.
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• If safety stock planning is enabled in ASCP, the safety stock quantities will be
copied from ASCP to Rapid Planning and the Rapid Planning plan option Safety
Stock lead time method will be set to “Safety Stock Quantity”.
• All supplies that are selected for freezing through criteria specified in the
“Define Incremental Replan Scope” screen will be considered “Firm All”. This
means all the underlying resource and material requirements will also be
considered firm. This enhancement enables planners to better preserve decisions
made in the ASCP plan run while running simulations in Rapid Planning.
• The copy process from ASCP to Rapid Planning can be invoked in a batch mode
at the end of the ASCP plan run. This is controlled by a new ASCP Plan launch
parameter, “Copy Plan Output to Simulation Plans”. This enhancement improves
planner productivity by eliminating the need to perform a manual copy process
each time a simulation needs to be performed.
When creating planned orders for items with FDS, Rapid Planning will take into account
existing on hands, firm and non firm scheduled receipts, planning time fence and
capacity constraints. Rapid planning will also calculate a measure, “Days of Supply,”
which represents the number of days of demand that is covered by the projected
available balance at the end of each planning time bucket. An exception message will be
generated if the Days of Supply exceeds the fixed days of supply. Planners can also
perform simulations by changing the Fixed Days Supply for an item within the plan or
using a simulation set.
FDS is fully supported in unconstrained plans. Constrained plans support FDS order
modifiers only for purchased parts.
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With Release 12.1.3.9, Rapid Planning has been enhanced to respect sourcing allocation
percentages specified in sourcing rules when creating buy, transfer and make supplies.
This feature is available both in unconstrained and constrained plans and can be enabled
by checking the Enforce Sourcing Splits plan option. Planners can also specify a
sourcing allocation window as a number of days. Rapid Planning will attempt to meet the
prescribed sourcing splits, in a cumulative fashion, within each allocation window inside
the planning horizon. The planning process also takes into account historical sourcing
splits to date (based on plan option Start Date Offset for Sourcing History) when
calculating the cumulative sourcing splits in the plan. Enforcement of sourcing splits is a
lower priority compared to the enforcement of lead time and capacity constraints. These
higher order constraints may cause a deviation between the planned and target sourcing
splits. In such cases, an exception message, “Sourcing Split Percentage Violated,” will
be generated. The exception message will be generated only if the magnitude of the
deviation exceeds a threshold (specified as a percentage value in the Sourcing Variance
Tolerance plan option.)
• Search criteria when searching for Make Orders in the "Clear to Build
Simulation" work area can be saved with user defined names using the "Saved
Search" feature. (Note: the "Run Automatically" feature within the Saved Search
is not supported.)
• Make Orders that are seen in the Make Orders table in the "Clear to Build
Simulation" work area can now be exported to Excel. Note that this is supported
only for the table where the Make Orders are displayed, and not from the table
where contentions are seen.
• The following columns have been added to the Make Orders table in the "Clear
to Build Simulation" work area:
o Planner
o Suggested Order Date
o Suggested Ship Date
o Actual Start Date
o Need By Date
o Old Due Date
o Revised Demand Date
o Original Need By Date
The above columns display the same values as seen for the make order in the
Supply and Demand View. The above are included in the "Clear to Build
Simulation" work area only for better visibility.
Except for "Planner", the above columns are not enabled as searchable fields.
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• Minor changes have been made to the table toolbar in the contentions table - the
text "Enter Query by Example Mode" and "Remove from CTB Consideration"
that were visible next to the respective icons have been removed. The text is now
visible as hover text on these icons.
In addition, the allocation of threads to individual save plan tasks dedicated to each
saved entity has been enhanced to consider the load (table row count) imposed by each
saved entity.
This enhancement allows you to quickly save detailed performance metrics, calculated
measures such as projected available balance, along with plan outputs, for plans that
have large data sets.
The calculation of the “Clear to Build” attribute on Make Orders (planned and actual)
has changed in this release. Orders that are not Clear to Build have their Clear to Build
statuses marked as “No – On Time” and “No – At Risk”, as compared to only “No”
earlier.
Make Orders marked “No - On Time” have component requirements pegged to supplies
that are available by the Need By Date on the order, and thus are expected to be available
on time for the order (on or before the Need By date.) Make Orders marked “No – At
Risk” have component requirements pegged to supplies beyond the order’s Need By
Date thus indicating a potential risk the timely completion of the order.
This is the date on which all the purchased components required for the make order will
be available.
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This is the number of days of delay between the expected availability of all components
(Clear to Build Date) and the Need By Date of the order. The number of days is
expressed in working days per the manufacturing calendar of the organization.
This is the quantity of the make order that is ready to build at present. It is calculated by
multiplying the “Ready to Build %” (an existing attribute) with the make order quantity.
This indicates whether the make order is pegged to substitute components. The value of
this attribute is either “Yes” or “No”.
Usability Enhancements
The Clear to Build Workbench has been enhanced to support the following:
• The Advanced Search in the Clear to Build Make Orders table now supports the
additional search attributes Planner, Suggested Order Date, Suggested Ship Date,
Actual Start Date , Need By Date, Old Due Date, Revised Demand Date, and
Original Need By Date.
• All new attributes introduced in this release (see above) will also be available in
Advanced Search.
In Release 12.2.4 Rapid Planning will plan supplies to meet demands of items that are
part of a ship set. This will be possible in both constrained and unconstrained plans. All
demands that are part of a ship set will have the same demand due date. Rapid Planning
will plan the demands in such a way that individual demands on the same ship sets have
the same demand satisfied dates. In other words, none of the order lines that are part of a
ship set get fulfilled until there are enough supplies to meet each line. The supplies that
peg to the demands within the ship set will be aligned with the common demand satisfied
date of all the demands to the extent allowed by capacity and material constraints. If the
ship set as a whole is late, a late replenishment exception will be raised for each of the
demands within the ship set.
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The ship set value will be displayed as a demand attribute in the Supplies and Demands
window in Rapid Planning. Planners will be able to filter the list of demands by ship set
value and sales order number. Planners will be able to simulate different shipping and
demand satisfaction patterns by changing the ship set value on sales order lines within
the plan and rerunning the plan. Planners can simulate removal of a sales order line from
a ship set, movement of a sales order line from one ship set to another or the creation of a
new ship set within the sales order.
The “Launch Simulation Planner” concurrent program will be enhanced to include a new
parameter “Launch Snapshot”. If this parameter is set to Yes, the plan is run with a fresh
snapshot and if this parameter is set to No, the plan is run without a fresh snapshot.
A new concurrent program “Copy Simulation Plan” will be available to copy one Rapid
Planning plan to another in a batch mode.
Customers can schedule plan runs with and without snapshot and create copies of these
plans as needed, interlaced with externally generated updates to the plan data to automate
the end to end business process that surrounds their planning process with Rapid
Planning.
With Release 12.2.4, planners will be able to simulate changes to demand priorities
across all or a subset of demands by feeding a set of externally generated demand
priorities as an input to the planning process. Planners should first run a plan with a fresh
snapshot and a default priority rule such as “Schedule date” to generate a baseline plan.
Planners can then export the demands from the plan, adjust the priorities and/or due
dates of these demands (using any tool of their choice) and upload the updated priorities
to the planning data repository. Finally, planners can rerun the plan (without a fresh
snapshot) to take into account the updated dates and priorities.
The Launch plan process (both within the Rapid Planning user interface and in batch
mode) will include a new parameter called “Use Mass Updated Demand Priorities”
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which needs to be selected to instruct the planning process to consider the updated
demand priorities. The order priority and suggested due date shown in the user interface
will be reflective of the updated priorities and due dates and the supply plan will be
created in accordance with the new dates and priorities. A new attribute “Original Due
Date” will store the value of the demand due date prior to the mass update.
Rapid Planning represents the flow routing as a single operation, single resource routing
(where the line is the resource), and uses the inverse of the maximum line rate (the
minimum will be ignored) to determine the usage. Operations specified in the flow
routing are ignored. Resource requirements for planned orders that use flow routings
have operation sequence number and resource sequence number both set to 0, and the
resource is the Line. Components of the item with the flow routing are planned at the
beginning of the supply. Existing supplies in the form of flow schedules are treated as
firm by Rapid Planning.
Rapid Planning treats flow lines as regular resources and raises resource overload and
constraint exceptions where necessary. If you wish to determine the root cause of the
lateness due to a resource constraint, Rapid Planning’s Constraint Details provide the
flow line constraints causing the delay. Resource loading information can be viewed in
the Resource Plan screen. For Line resources, the Available Capacity, Required
Capacity, Net Capacity Available and Cum Capacity available are shown as a throughput
rate unlike for regular production resources where they are shown in hours.
Planned Orders can be released to the execution system by running the concurrent
program “Push Plan Information”. Simulations with flow lines (by running the plan
without refresh snapshot) are possible by editing the “Max Rate” column in the Resource
Screen and/or the resource uptime and capacity units in the Resource Availability screen.
Any component that is marked as a use up item in an ECO is treated as an item for which
no new planned orders can be created. If you set up a component as a use up component
in the BOM of one assembly item but don’t specify it as a use up component in BOMs of
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other assembly items that use that same component, Rapid Planning will not create
planned orders for that component even if the other assembly items require that
component.
In EBS Engineering it is possible to specify a use up ECO for an assembly item where
the use up item is a) an existing component in the BOM or b) the assembly item itself.
Rapid Planning only supports planning based on use up ECOs where the use up item is a
component item. If the use up item is marked as the assembly item it will not be treated
as a use up ECO in Rapid Planning.
In the Items screen in Rapid Planning, there is a new item attribute called “Use Up” that
is a calculated attribute with possible values of “Yes” and “No”. Items that are use up
components in one or more ECOs will be shown with a Yes value and all other items
will be shown with a “No” value. The items screen will also display the inventory use up
date for the item.
The Bill of Materials screen in Rapid Planning shows the effective dates of both the new
and use-up items, with the new column “Change Notice” displaying the name of the
ECO. There is a new attribute called “Use Up” in the Bill of Materials screen that will be
marked as “Yes” for use up components in the bill of materials.
Rapid Planning forms part of the implementation process of an ECO through the “Push
Plan Information” concurrent program, which pushes a list of eligible use-up items (from
the plan output) back to EBS Engineering. You can select an item as the use-up
component and can have Rapid Planning plan the cutover to the new component based
on the use-up of the component. The resulting inventory use up date can be pushed back
to EBS Engineering and be used as the effective date in the BOM, or you can execute
more such iterative simulation cycles to arrive at the desired effective date.
You can simulate the change of use-up items in an existing ECO and the creation of a
new ECO by entering a component for a BOM within Rapid Planning and assigning that
item as a use-up item.
All measures displayed at the Item level or Category level are displayed at the Grand
Total level.
Note – Global Forecast is part of the Forecast measure and it is not displayed at the
Grand Total Level. The Global forecast is itself an aggregate entity across all
organizations.
Grand Total is editable for Planned Order, Forecast, and Manual Demand. All cells, with
zero or non-zero values, are editable for Planned Order and Manual Demand. Only non-
zero values are editable for Forecast. Updating a Grand Total cell value triggers a
propagation which updates the corresponding item or category level cells for the
corresponding time buckets.
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o Zero to Non-zero: Planned Order and Manual Demand are inserted equally for
all underlying items / dates or categories and dates.
o Non-Zero to Zero: Planned Order, Forecast, and Manual Demand are updated to
zero for all items / dates or categories / dates that had non-zero values.
Note – Changing a Grand Total cell value to zero updates all corresponding lower level
cell values to zero.
Save Changes Behavior – The functional behavior of the “Save Changes” button has
not changed.
Refresh View Behavior – When you click on the “Refresh View” button after changing
a measure value, a pop-up window with the following message is displayed:
If you respond with “Yes”, all pending changes are saved into the data base.
If you respond with “No”, no refresh or save action is performed by the system.
With the “Refresh View” icon/button you can refresh and save the values of a modified
measure at the Item/Category levels to reflect the modification at the Grand Total level.
In addition the values of all related measures at the Grand Total/Item/Category levels are
refreshed and saved to reflect the modification accordingly (assuming you click on the
“Yes” button in the pop-up window appearing after clicking on the “Refresh View”
button).
With the “Refresh View” icon/button you can refresh and save the values of a modified
measure at the Grand Total level to reflect the modification at the Item/Category levels.
In addition the values of all related measures at the Grand Total/Item/Category levels are
refreshed and saved to reflect the modification accordingly.
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3.19. Oracle Service Parts Planning
3.19.1. Product Overview
Oracle Service Parts Planning (SPP) brings advanced multi-echelon supply chain
planning to a service supply chain consisting of internal warehouses, emergency stocking
locations, internal repair depots, external repair vendors, and external new buy vendors.
Oracle SPP is a new product dedicated to the service parts planning domain. It offers an
integrated forecasting and replenishment planning workbench, planning logic dedicated
to the unique characteristics of the service parts planning domain (such as reverse
logistics, multiple part conditions, and part supersession), and seamless integration to
Oracle Supply Chain Management and Oracle Service (Spares Management and Depot
Repair) applications to support execution of planned replenishment actions, including
external and internal repair.
A service parts planning workbench lets you view and manipulate forecasts as well as
transfer, and new buy and repair recommendations and transactions. All demand/supply,
exception, item attribute and comments pertaining to a service part are visible in a single
screen, creating a very efficient user experience for the planner.
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3.19.2.3. Integration to Spares Management for External Repairs
SPP plans for repair of defective spare parts at external vendors. Movement of defective
parts to the repair vendor, repair lead times and yields at the repair vendor, and
movement of repaired (good) parts back to an internal warehouse are considered. The
repair vendor must be modeled as an inventory organization. Upon release of a
recommendation for external repair, integration with Oracle Spares Management
automatically creates the repair purchase order to the repair vendor, the internal sales
order to move defectives to the repair vendor, and the underlying work orders necessary
to progress the repair through the repair vendor. (Management of the work orders is
automatic and does not require user intervention.) Tracking of repair progress is done
through a workbench in Oracle Spares Management.
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3.19.2.9. Minimize New Buys
SPP exhausts on-hand supplies of substitutable item revisions and options for repair of
defective supplies before recommending, as a last resort, purchase of new spare parts to
satisfy spares demand.
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have experienced net changes in demand/supply, item attributes, supersession or repair to
relationships, or supplier capacity; it will overlay those plan results on top of pre-existing
plan results for other items. This feature operates in conjunction with net change
collections.
While previously a single 'Memory Based Forecaster' process was launched to generate a
forecast for all items in the plan, you can now launch multiple processes, so that
forecasts for different item-chains are generated in parallel. This profile determines the
number of such processes that are launched in parallel for forecasting.
• the forecast methods that Oracle Service Parts Planning (SPP) employs to
generate a 'Blended' (Bayesian weighted average) forecast, and
• the safety stock calculation method used by Oracle Inventory Optimization (IO).
IO assumes Poisson-distributed demand variability for intermittent demands,
normally-distributed demand variability for non-intermittent demands.
Previously the SPP Forecast Rule screen had an option to specify whether the history
data was intermittent or not. This approach this had two inherent issues: (i) the forecast
rule is independent of item and (ii) non-SPP users of Oracle Inventory Optimization
needed to set up SPP Forecast Rules in order to trigger IO's intermittent demand
calculations.
Release 12.1.2 has an enhanced Item Attribute Mass Maintenance (IMM) form, with a
new item attribute 'Intermittent Demand' added. This attribute will be used to specify
whether the history pattern is intermittent or not, and will be referred to by the SPP
forecasting engine, and by IO. This will be available both on the Item-Organization and
Item-Zone tab of the IMM. The options on the Forecast Rule screen to specify whether
history is intermittent or not have been removed.
Oracle Service Parts Planning already had a 'Planner Worklist' that could be set up for
each planner so that it dynamically lists important exceptions / key recommendations on
his items. This shows the most important to-dos that each planner must take care of at
any given time.
The Planner Worklist has been further enhanced in Oracle Service Parts Planning 12.1.2.
The grouping of exceptions and recommendations has been rationalized so that the
results are presented in a more concise manner, and it is easier to drill down from this
prioritized list of tasks to details regarding each.
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3.19.4. Release 12.1.3
Reorder point based planning is a widely adopted method of planning replenishments for
service parts. It uses demand forecasts and item lead times to decide when to place a new
order in order to avoid dipping into safety stock. Orders are usually created for the
economic order quantity, in order to strike a balance between purchasing and carrying
costs.
PAB Profile
Q
u
a Re-order
n Quantity
t
i
t Safety
y Stock
Time
Demand Supply
Oracle Service Parts Planning 12.1.3 has been enhanced to support Re-order point based
planning. SPP computes the safety stock target for a part based on mean absolute
deviation (for parts with regular demand) or assuming a Poisson distribution (for parts
with intermittent demand), or reads in safety stock targets from other sources (like
Inventory Optimization). It then dynamically determines when to place an order,
depending on this safety stock target and future demand.
SPP also computes the Economic Order Quantity using the standard formula, so that new
orders are placed for this quantity. The user also has the option to override the system
computed values. The values of safety stock and EOQ can be recalculated during a
planning run, or they can be retained at their existing values.
The Simulation Set in SPP is used by planners for mass maintenance of data. This is
however difficult to use when the planner has to manually enter or edit values for each
attribute in the forms UI.
SPP 12.1.3 has been enhanced to support a mass upload of item attribute values into the
simulation set. A standard format spreadsheet template is provided as part of legacy
collections flat file loads. The planner can use this template to enter / edit / delete
attribute values, and then upload the spreadsheet file to mass update the values for the
respective attributes on the items.
The Planner Workbench (Supply Demand Analysis) screen has also been enhanced to
enable update of item attributes that will then be considered in an online replan.
An OEM manufacturing products often manufactures spare parts for them too. Typically
the OEM would have a distinct service supply chain, where defective products are
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returned and repaired. In case there is not sufficient supply of defective parts (that can be
repaired) in the service supply chain, new parts may have to be manufactured. Thus the
manufacturing facility that manufactures the parts will have two sets of demands – one
coming from the manufacturing supply chain, and the second coming from the service
supply chain.
Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) plans for the manufacturing supply
chain and currently handles the first stream of demand. ASCP is now integrated with
Oracle Service Parts Planning (SPP) which plans for the service supply chain. Thus SPP
would take in demand from the Service supply chain and try to meet these demands
through repair of defective parts. In case all demands cannot be met in this manner, SPP
can source parts from the manufacturing supply chain. This ‘demand’ for spare parts
from SPP is read in by ASCP (by virtue of the SPP plan being a demand schedule in the
ASCP plan). ASCP then plans the manufacture.
The Service Parts Planner dashboard is structured to address the typical questions that a
parts planner would have and includes a number of service-specific measures and KPIs,
such as repairs versus new buys, internal versus external repairs, service contracts
performance.
The SPP dashboard has five pages: the first, a Plan Health summary, summarizes
demand and supply, exceptions, and service agreements.
The Demand and Supply page enables the planner to start with an overall view of
demand satisfaction in the service supply chain, and drill down all the way into the SPP
planner workbench.
The Exceptions page of the Service Parts Planner dashboard highlights key exceptions in
the service parts plan and enables the planner to investigate their causes.
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The Service Level Agreement Analysis page is meant for evaluating service contracts.
The planner can see compliance to service contracts, and review costs, revenues,
profitability and achieved versus target safety stocks. The reports on this page are based
on Inventory Optimization plans.
Finally the Historical Performance page gives the planner a picture of how the plan is
tracking against actuals. The planner can compare how actuals for measures such as
shipments and returns, compare against SPP plan output.
A ‘Supply Allocation Rule’ screen has been added to SPP to specify the organizations
whose demands can compete for constrained supplies at a source organization. SPP
allocates supplies to demands based on the demand priority. If there is insufficient
supply and there are multiple competing demands of the same priority in the ‘allocation
bucket’, supplies at the source organization are fair shared amongst them in the ratio of
the ‘current demand.’ In case of a tie, the organization priority specified in the Supply
Allocation Rule is used as a tiebreaker.
SPP considers demands across the supersession chain while fair sharing supplies.
Supplies are also fair shared among safety stock demands, after reserving a portion of the
supplies to meet the source organization safety stock target.
The SPP Supply Demand Analysis window has been enhanced to add an ‘Unconstrained
Demand’ row, so that the planner can identify the various demands that are competing
for constrained supplies within a time bucket.
SPP has therefore been enhanced in release 12.1.3.2 to enable ‘Query-based Auto-
release’. The planner can now define queries, and then specify whether (a) the records
returned by the query should be released or (b) the records returned by the query (say
ones that cause an exception) should be blocked from release, and all other orders be
released. Further, an ‘Applied-to’ column has been added, so that the release action is
applied to all orders for the particular item/supersession, or to all orders for that
item/supersession in that organization.
In addition to these, certain forecasting related metrics (like MAPE) are computed in
Demantra and exported to SPP. These metrics have been enabled for inclusion in queries,
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so that, say orders for items can be blocked from release if the forecast accuracy is too
low.
This information is then used, along with the computed failure rate of each service part
in the Installed Base item, to determine the service parts forecast.
In Release 12.1.3.2, when you collect the Installed Base under Contract, the Field
Replaceable Units (FRU) BOM can be automatically derived. In order to enable this, all
FRUs have to be included in a designated category set. FRU BOMs are then derived
based on parts belonging to this category set: (a) that are part of the manufacturing BOM
of the Install Base item; or (b) if the debrief on a service request for the Installed Base
item includes a part belonging to this category set.
This FRU BOM is then used in Demantra Demand Management to compute the failure
rate of parts, which is then used in computing the service parts forecast.
Oracle Service Parts Planning has been enhanced in Release 12.1.3.2 to pull in the notes
that are created in Spares Management, and display them on the key screens where a
planner may review the supersession: the Planner Worklist, Supply Demand Analysis,
and Supersession screens.
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balance between these two. Oracle Inventory Optimization considers the demand and
supply variability, lead times, lead time variability etc and recommends optimal safety
stock levels at each of these locations.
However, not all demand in the service supply chain can be predicted. If there were an
unexpected critical demand in the supply chain at a location, the required parts may have
already been positioned downstream. In this case, holding parts at the upstream location
would have permitted responding more quickly to the unexpected demand.
The ‘Reserved Safety Stock’ functionality allows reserving a portion of the safety stock
at a location; only the remaining supply is available for shipping to other locations. This
ensures that there is always some supply available to meet unexpected demand.
The quantity of safety stock that should be reserved can either be specified as an absolute
value, or as a percentage of the calculated (time-varying) safety stock for that
organization.
This feature is not available in base 12.1.3.8, but will be made available as a patch on top
of Release 12.1.3.8.
Service supply chains usually hold some inventory at regional warehouses in order to
quickly service customer requests. However varying demand patterns may warrant
rebalancing inventory between these regional warehouses when there is inventory excess
in one and a shortage at another.
In this release, the inventory rebalancing capability of Oracle Service Parts Planning
(SPP) has been enhanced to support the specification of rankings on the rebalancing
sources for an organization. This allows SPP’s rebalancing logic to prefer rebalancing
between organizations close to each other. SPP reads in priorities of the various
rebalancing sources and tries to rebalance with sources in rank order. This functionality
can lead to significant savings in transportation costs.
Demands arising out of maintenance work orders within Enterprise Asset Management’s
(EAM) “Production” plan will be collected, recognized and planned for within SPP.
Planned supplies created in SPP to meet these demands will be released to EAM as
Planned New Buy Orders or Planned Repair Orders.
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address this requirement. While deciding on this, meeting the demand on time is the
primary objective for SPP, so it recommends repairs only as long as that meets demands
on time.
SPP is therefore being enhanced to support specifying a rank for rebalancing sources.
With this enhancement, a planner can get SPP to evaluate other sources before checking
for excess at sources with which rebalancing is enabled. All rebalancing sources have the
same rank, and, within those sources, the ‘Inventory rebalance ranks’ are used to decide
the sequence in which SPP checks for excess.
Since the Spares business typically deals with a very large number of part-locations,
often running into the millions, it is useful to combine these part-locations into logical
groups based on rules, and manage the groups, rather than manage individual part
locations. Further, it is often required to classify parts differently for different purposes.
For example, you may wish to group parts based on cost while setting safety stock
policy, but group parts based on ABC class while setting service levels. Therefore, the
same part will belong to a different group in each classification.
Oracle Service Parts Planning has been enhanced to support this. You can define rules,
based on which part-locations are automatically combined into logical groups. You can
classify parts based on dynamic criteria such as historical or projected demand, and you
can classify parts based on user-defined business criteria that you upload. You can then
control various planning parameters such as service levels and stocking rules based on
these groups.
Service supply chains often have a local distribution centers (DCs) that primarily service
customer locations within the DC’s region. The parts that are stocked at each local DC
are determined by, among other things, by the value of the part and the historical demand
for the part within the region. A high value part with low demand within a region is a
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good candidate for stocking at a central DC or at an alternate local DC whose region has
more substantial demand for the part.
Oracle Service Parts Planning has been enhanced to allow automating the part stocking
decision. You can define stocking demand thresholds for part-region-DC combinations.
If the regional demand for a part does satisfy its stocking threshold at the local DC, SPP
will stock the part at the local DC and source the part’s regional demand there. If the
regional demand for a part does not satisfy the stocking threshold, then SPP will source
the region’s part demand to an alternate DC (from a list that you specify), one for which
the part stocking threshold is satisfied. Once you define stocking rules that contain
stocking thresholds and lists of alternate DCs, SPP will automatically generate the
sourcing rules and assignment set to source demands from and stock parts at the
appropriate DCs.
The Orders to be Rescheduled In/Out and Orders to be Cancelled exceptions have been
enhanced to also highlight information on the specific demand that is triggering the
change recommendation. The exceptions have additional fields that specify the type of
end-pegged demand, the demand number, date, quantity, and the reason for the
recommendation (to avoid a back order, to meet forecast on time, to meet safety stock
level, etc.)
Demand forecasts are usually generated based upon historical data using statistical
techniques. Demand Planners often review the system generated forecast and impose
judgmental overrides.
In this release, Oracle Service Parts Planning has been enhanced to retain the manual
edits made to the forecast from a previous plan run when that plan is rerun. You can
choose to retain the forecast overrides made in the previous run, allow them to be
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overwritten by the newly generated forecast, or keep the overrides only within the
planning time fence.
• Only lead time and calendar constraints are considered by SPP– supplier
capacity constraints are not considered
• Since Repair is not supported by SPP, only “Usable” supply is used by SPP –
“Defective” supply is ignored
• SPP will generate replenishments only for the latest revision item in a
supersession chain by default – when doing so, it will consider eligible supply
from lower level supersession items when calculating replenishments. Lower
revision items will be considered by SPP only if their policy parameters have
been manually specified
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3.19.8.2. Plan Option Changes
A new attribute in the Plan Option screen header section called “Replenishment Method”
has been introduced in this release. When this is set to “Policy Based”, SPP’s Policy
Planning behavior is enabled.
When the Replenishment Method is set to “Policy Based” some options are editable
while many existing Plan Options are not editable as per below:
• Main: A new field called “Replenishment Order Generation” has been added
with permissible values of “Single Replenishment” or “Time Phased
Replenishment”. This determines whether SPP generates only a single
replenishment by considering only existing supply and demand within the lead
time of the item, or whether multiple replenishments are generated as required,
across the entire plan horizon. All other fields in the “Main” section of Plan
Options are disabled
• Aggregation: Only the “Plan Start Date” and the “Plan End Date” are enabled
• Items: The “Include Items from the Following Category Set” is enabled, along
with the Category selection table
A Policy Plan can also be specified as a demand schedule within the plan options of a
regular SPP Plan. This enables you to combine Policy Planning and regular planning
behavior – for example, at lower tiers of a supply chain you can run Policy Plans to
generate replenishments – at higher tiers of the supply chain where inventory
rebalancing, fair sharing and other advanced planning features are typically required, you
can launch regular SPP plans by considering the dependent demand generated by
organizations at the lower tiers.
• Inventory Policy
• Policy UOM
• Min (Units)
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• Max (Units)
• Min (Days)
• Max (Days)
• Policy UOM
• Min (Units)
• Max (Units)
• Min (Days)
• Max (Days)
• On Order – indicates the quantity of replenishment orders that have already been
created within the plan
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• Max Recommended (Units) - This is a recommended policy parameter as
determined by SPP to maintain service levels
• Min Override (Units) – This is the manually specified policy parameter to drive
replenishment in an override mode
• Max Override (Units) - This is the manually specified policy parameter to drive
replenishment in an override mode
• Min Override (Days) - This is the manually specified policy parameter to drive
replenishment in an override mode
• Max Override (Days) - This is the manually specified policy parameter to drive
replenishment in an override mode
• Planned New Buy Orders (Creation Date) – This indicates the quantity of
replenishment bucketized by Creation date of the planned order – this quantity
adds to the On Order quantity
• Target Service Level % - this is an input parameter for SPP Policy Planning,
inherited from IO. SPP tries to maintain the PAB every day to correspond to this
Target Service Level %
• Uncovered Demand – SPP calculates the uncovered demand from the PAB by
comparing it with the forecast and its distribution ; this represents the demand
that may not be covered by the PAB on that day
• Uncovered Variance - SPP calculates the uncovered demand from the PAB and
comparing it with the forecast and its distribution ; this represents the
variance/uncertainty of the demand that may not be covered by the PAB on that
day
The following existing measures are used by SPP for Policy Planning:
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• Original Forecast: This is considered by SPP when determining replenishments –
forecast is input into the SPP Policy Plan as a Demand Schedule in its Plan
Options
• Sales Orders: Any sales orders are considered as demand by SPP when
determining replenishment – for a given day, the maximum of the Sales Order or
forecast is considered as demand for that day (forecast spreading and
consumption is not performed in Policy Planning)
• Purchase Requisitions
• Purchase Orders
• Internal Requisitions
The above measures will be used to drive replenishment based on user input – SPP will
use the values in these measures to calculate replenishment, ignoring any values in other
measures.
• Min/Max: In this policy type, the Min and Max values are specified
• ROP-OQ: In this policy type, the Re-order point is specified, and is considered
equivalent to the Min. Replenishment is generated for the order quantity (OQ).
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The Order Quantity itself is derived in IO and read by SPP, or can be
independently uploaded into SPP through the IMM
Policy Values can either be specified in Days or Quantity. When specified in Days, the
Average Daily Demand is used to convert from Days to Quantity.
When the SPP Policy Plan is run in time-phased mode, SPP generates replenishments
across the entire plan horizon, as required. Its objective is to maintain the Estimated
Service Level % above the Target Service Level % - to do so, SPP may override the
specified policy parameters and create replenishments that are different from what the
default policy may suggest.
A new button called “Publish” has been introduced in the Part Classification Rule. Once
the classification has been published, the association between a Category and its Items is
recognized by the Oracle Inventory Optimization engine. This is required because Policy
Parameters are setup only at a Category level through the Policy Parameter set, not at an
Item level – IO will use the classification data to ascribe appropriate policies to Items
depending on which Category they are classified into.
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3.19.8.11. New Service Parts Planning Work Area
You now have access to an all-new ADF-based planning work area called the Service
Parts Planning Work Area. This will allow you to access and analyze plans in a simple,
browser based UI.
The new Service Parts Planning work area is completely configurable via user-defined
page layouts, and will have the following capabilities:
• View/Edit Plan Options
• View/Edit Plan Items
a. Item (Prime, Supersession)
b. Notes
c. Product definition
1. Supersession Chain
2. Failure Rates
3. Parts Usage
• View/Edit Material Plan
a. Supply and Demand Analysis View (Seeded Table Layout) – Aggregate
View Organization List
b. Forecast Analysis View (Seeded Table Layout) – Aggregate View Zone List
• View/Edit Supplies and Demands
• View/Edit Favorites including Plan Summary
• View/Edit Preferences
• Replan Options
• Create Plan
• Copy Plan
• Launch Plan
• Release Plan
• Seeded Layouts
a. Exceptions and Material Plan
b. Exceptions and Items
c. Items and Material Plan
• Plan Name
• Plan Description
• Inactive Date
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• Organization
• Assignment Set
• Item Simulation Set – Select a simulation set from the list of values. A simulation set
is a set of adjustments to the base. You can define different simulation sets to model
different scenarios.
In this release, you have two options for planning your service parts. You can either
select “Standard” or “Policy Based” replenishment method from the list of values of the
“Replenishment Method” field.
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Organization Tab – In Release 12.2.6, Organizations and Items are main level
tabs similar to other tabs (Main, Aggregation, Optimization, Release Orders, and
Policy Planning). In the previous releases, Organizations and Items were the sub
tabs of a main level tab called Scope.
Below is an illustration of Plan Options Organizations Tab:
Items Tab – In this release the Items tab is a main level tab. In the previous
releases, where in the previous releases the Items tab was a sub tab of a main level
tab called Scope.
Below is an illustration of Plan Options Items Tab:
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Optimization Tab – Below is an illustration of Plan Options Optimization Tab:
Release Rules Tab – Below is an illustration of Plan Options Release Rules Tab:
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1. Item
2. Organization
3. Description
5. Repair Program
The following repair programs for a given item and repair supplier combination. This
information affects both planning repair lead time and generated recommendation
messages.
6. Planner
7. Repair Lead Time – This attribute represents the amount of time that the repair
organization requires, in days, to process a defective part into a usable part. This
definition is always in the context of the final usable part or product. For example, if
item B is created by repairing item A, then planning uses the repair lead time for
item B when calculating the lead time offset to repair defective item A.
8. Repair Yield – This attribute represents the proportion of the item quantity sent to
repair that is successfully repaired to specifications for usable parts. It is inputted as
a decimal representing a percentage (ex. 0.75= 75%).This definition is always in the
context of the final usable part or product. For example, if item B is created by
repairing item A, then planning uses the repair yield for item B when calculating the
proportion of defective item A that is successfully repaired.
9. Repair Cost
Product Definition
The Product Definition UI will be accessible by using the “Drill To” button from the
following pages:
• Items
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• Exception Details
The context will be based on the selected Item-Organization in the above UIs.
• Supersession Chain
• Failure Rates
• Parts Usage
Supersession Chain
Supersession items are considered in the service supply chain. Engineering changes in
the product generate revised items that are managed based on the supersession definition.
For details on the supersession definition and use in Service Parts Planning, refer to the
Oracle Spares Management User Guide.
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Failure Rates
This represents the average periodic failure rate of the product population. If the failure
rates of service parts are known along with the overall product population, you can use
that information as a basis of forecasting the demand and supply of the service parts. The
overall product population is composed of the current products in service and future or
anticipated products to be serviced.
Parts Usage
The Parts Usage window provides a where-used view of all the products that consume a
given service part during maintenance or service.
A new button named “Item” in the Items page toolbar with the list of values of Prime
and Supersession allows you to see the context of a selected item in the Items page as
well as its Prime and Supersession in the Material Plan or Supplies and Demands when
they are open as the second page.
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In the above example, user has selected the value of “Supersession” from the “Item”
LOV. Then user opens the Material Plan which displays the related information for the
item BUY12020 Supersession Chain. There are 3 items in this chain: BUY12020,
BUY12021, and BUY12022. This means now that the Material Plan page shows the
related information for all those 3 items, the Supersession Chain.
Note – When the Items page is open, you can select “Prime” or “Supersession” from the
“Item” LOV and then if you open one of the following pages listed below, the
corresponding context of the selected items in the Items page are passed to these pages:
• Material Plan
• Exceptions
Notes Page
Customers often require the ability to add free-form notes associated with an item.
You can use the “Notes” from the “Drill To” menu in the Items page toolbar to access
the “Notes” window to create and delete notes for the selected items in the Items page.
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Planners can specify notes for a service part.
Knowing in which plan the notes were entered is useful. Thus, while saving the notes,
the plan name is also saved.
Deleting Notes
In addition the system should allow for the delete to be a separate privilege that can be
removed from a custom responsibility if necessary.
When coming to Material Plan page with no item context, you can use the “Item” button
in the tool bar to search and select for items.
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Material Plan can be displayed at the item level or at the aggregate level of single or
multiple organizations or zones.
Please see the Material Plan Seeded Layouts section for more information.
An Organization List can be defined or modified in the “Edit Org List” Popup window
accessible by using the “Org List” button in the toolbar of the Supply and Demand
Analysis view.
Step 1 – Define an aggregate org named “BG ORGS” in the Edit Org List window. As an
example, the aggregate org includes the following organizations: SLC:M1, SLC:M2,
SLC:D1, and SLC:S1.
Step 2 – Select the “BG ORGS” form the list of values in the Organization field in the
Supply and Demand Analysis view tool bar.
Step 3 – The Material Plan results for the selected items are aggregated for the selected
organizations in the aggregate org “BG ORGS.”
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Similarly, a Zone List can be defined or modified in the “Edit Org List” Popup window
accessible by using the “Zone List” button in the toolbar of the Forecast Analysis view.
2. Forecast Analysis
3. Policy Planning
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The measures for the Supply and Demand Analysis table layout are:
4. Independent Demand – (Internal Sales Order – Field Orgs + Sales Orders + Net
Forecast)
5. Dependent Demand
7. Beginning On-hand
14. Planned Transfer Orders – Transfer of supply from one org to the other
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19. Projected Available Balance – Cumulative (Total Demand – Total Supply)
Forecast Analysis
Note – When accessing Material Plan, system displays the “last selected table layout” for
each user in a session and across sessions.
For example if your last selected layout was Supply and Demand Analysis, when you
accessing Material Plan again system displays the Supply and Demand Analysis layout
as the default layout.
Note – If there is no last selected layout it will show then system displays Supply and
Demand Analysis (default) layout.
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3.19.8.15. SPP ADF UI - Supplies and Demands
The Supplies and Demands for Service Parts Planning can be accessed from the SPP
work Area using the plan link Supplies and Demands.
The Supplies and Demands UI used by SPP planners includes a pegging (tree-table)
view. Similar to Supplies and Demands UI in ASCP, planners can switch between tree
table and flat table view. When drilling to Supplies and Demands, the tree-table view
will be the default view that is displayed when in Plans mode. When in Plan Inputs
mode, the default view is the flat table view.
The “Edit Supplies and Demands” dialog is initiated by selecting the Create action
(either from the Actions menu or the iconic button on the table toolbar). The dialog
allows the user to create planned orders.
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configurable business criteria. Metrics are a special type of configured Favorites list used
for analytics, and support viewing Plan Summary key performance indicators in
graphical format (line or bar graphs). You can create multiple metrics using different key
measures. Each metric can be viewed in an Infotile format (graphs in a tiled view with
multiple tiles) or standard format (graphs arranged in a grid like view).
You can select a category set and default plan in the Preferences window.
• Category Set
• Default Plan
Note – The functionality that was provided by “View Recommendations for (Days from
Today)” preference, it is now available by using a new column in the Supplies and
Demands page:
• A new column is added in the Supplies and Demands page called "Due Date Days
Out." It is calculated as "Suggested Due Date" – "Plan Start Date" for all orders
(supplies and demands).
• This numeric field (Due Date Days Out) is also available in the Search panel with
the standard operators (Equals, Less than, Greater than – with the default being
"Less than").
Note – System is fetching data to the Preferences popup based on the seeded data for
Default Preferences Profile. So in case a new user tries to create/set user preferences, the
system associates the default profile to it and save it in DB.
Note – The current preferences are migrated to Release 12.2.6. In addition the system
validates that the required fields are populated before they are saved in DB.
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You can access the Replan Options popup window by selecting the “Replan Item” from
the Actions menu in the following Pages:
• Items
• Material Plan
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The fields in the Replan Options window are:
• Launch Planner
When the “Replan” functionality is used, all parts within the scope of the plan are
planned. If the Generate Inline Forecast option is enabled (The checkbox is checked),
then forecasts for all the parts in the scope of the plan are regenerated, regardless of
whether the time period specified in the Forecast Frequency field has been achieved.
You can define the Plan Options in the Create Plan window.
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The fields in the Copy Plan window are:
4. Copy plan options only (Checkbox) – Only the plan options of the source plan are
copied if this checkbox is checked.
Please see Oracle® Service Parts Planning Implementation and User's Guide
Release 12.2 for the list of exceptions.
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The fields in the Launch Plan window are:
1. Plan Name
6. Archive Current Version of Plan Summary – List of values are: “Yes” and “No.”
10. Launch (Radio Button) – Choices are: “Launch Now” or “Schedule.” You can select
a date if you choose “Schedule.”
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3.19.8.23. SPP ADF UI – Seeded Layouts
The seeded layouts are:
3.19.9.1. Organization Security Support in the Service Parts Planning Work Area
The following Service Parts Planning Work Area pages now support organization-based
security:
• Items
• Exceptions
• Supply Chain Bill
• Material Plan
• Supplies and Demands
• Plan Options
• Notes
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3.19.9.2. Delete Plan from Service Parts Planning Work Area
You can delete a plan from within the Service Parts Planning Work Area.
The ability to run simulations for these unexpected events is necessary for companies to
manage risk and these capabilities are now available in Strategic Network Optimization.
While most advanced planning software packages have simulation capabilities,
considering the unexpected nature of an event is absent. As an example, the simulation
of an unexpected plant shutdown in the future will trigger inventory pre-build in
anticipation of this event in most software packages. Since this event occurs
unexpectedly, this is not a realistic hedging strategy. Strategic Network Optimization
will simulate the surprise nature of this event and will present realistic options should
such an event occur. These simulations can also be run proactively to determine the
potential exposure, or risk, that your company faces.
The following enhancement will allow planners to analyze and mitigate risk by:
The Ability to consider unplanned, and planned events and its impact on the
supply chain
Vital to this enhancement is the concept of unplanned events. In order to simulate the
unpredictable nature of such events, the element of surprise needs to be reflected in the
solution. For example, if a plant is unexpectedly shut down due to a natural disaster the
solver should not pre-build inventory in anticipation of this event. This requirement will
be a key differentiator for the Strategic Network Optimization and strengthen its position
in the marketplace as the leader in Supply Chain Risk Management decision support
systems.
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3.20.1.2. Alerts
Alerts are used to assist the planner with identifying and resolving exceptions after
solving the model. The current mechanism to view and manage alerts in SNO is by
using the Over and Under User Sets. While this is useful, the generic Over/Under
categorization makes it difficult for users to quickly identify exceptions of a certain type.
Reports (Smart graphs) are typically created to supplement the Sets and present the
information in a more useful format. Reports require set up beforehand and multiple
reports are needed to identify exceptions of different types.
Introducing an alert framework in SNO alleviates the need to use both Sets and reports to
manage and review exceptions in the model. It will also provide a familiar alert
workflow that is typical in many planning applications. Because of it flexibility, SNO is
often used to solve non-traditional supply chain problems. This enhancement focuses on
the traditional strategic and tactical manufacturing & distribution use of the application.
Consideration for a more flexible framework to support non-traditional uses will be
considered in the future.
Alerts are categorized based on the business area. Within each category, the type of alert
violation will be identified. This provides the planner with the ability to quickly identify
and focus on the area of interest. The ability to drill-down and easily navigate to the
node or arc of interest is also an important requirement that is addressed.
You can drill-down to the exact location of the exception within a node or arc.
Alert categorization is more specific than Over and Under User Sets
categorization.
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This image shows the new Alerts area at the bottom of the Strategic Network
Optimization main user interface:
The number and type of alerts is displayed in the Model Workspace area. In the Model
Workspace tree, at the root level of Alerts, the number of alerts is displayed in brackets
and the word Alerts is displayed in bold font. If no exceptions are found in the model,
Alerts has no number in brackets next to it and the font is not bolded. In the example
above, total of (68) exceptions were found when the model was solved.
Within Alerts, there are six different alert categories. The number of exception found
within each type of alert is displayed next to the alert category in the Model Workspace
area. In the example above, (42) Demand alerts, (22) Inventory alerts, and (4)
Transportation alerts were found for a total of (68). Within each alert category, there are
several specific types of exceptions. If an exception is found, a red exclamation mark is
displayed next to the exception type and if no exceptions are found, a green checkmark is
displayed next to the exception type, as seen in the example above.
The Alerts section can be displayed across the bottom of the main user interface, as seen
in the example above. This section can be shown, expanded, or collapsed, using the up
and down arrows at the top of the section. If you double-click an Alerts folder in the
Model Workspace tree, the Alerts section at the bottom of the main user interface
expands. Single-clicking on an item in the Alerts section of the Model Workspace tree
displays the alert in the Alerts section at the bottom of the main user interface. The six
tabs; Demand, Inventory, Manufacturing, Transportation, Supply, and Other reflect the
alerts results and match the Alerts section in the Model Workspace tree.
When using alerts, each node or arc that you want to be alerted about is assigned an alert
category. To assign an alert category, a new Category drop-down list was added to nodes
and arcs:
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3.20.1.3. Key Performance Indicators
After running a scenario, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help you make detailed
scenario comparisons. They provide you with graphical representation of various metrics
in a model. KPIs can show you which scenario is most efficient at filling demand,
minimizing inventory costs, or providing the highest percentage of machine utilization.
Costs are categorized based on the types of costs in the nodes and arcs and are summed
across the whole planning horizon, not by period. KPIs are only visible in Key
Performance Indicators view.
Transportation Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model
where Category is set to Transportation.
Production Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where
Category is set to Manufacturing.
Supply Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where
Category is set to Supply.
Inventory Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where
Category is set to Inventory.
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Other Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where
Category is null.
By default, Key Performance Indicator data is displayed in bar chart format. However,
the data can also be displayed in pie chart format or polar format by clicking the Pie or
Polar tabs. A polar chart displays points in a graph based on data in the scenario. An
example of a polar chart can be seen here below:
Polar chart
By default, each scenario defined in the Model Workspace appears in the Key
Performance Indicators view. However, you can use the KPI Selection Dialog to choose
which key performance indicators scenarios are displayed.
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The concept of scenarios was introduced in previous versions of Strategic Network
Optimization. However, scenarios are now created and run from the Model Workspace
tree as seen below:
The concept of events is new to this version of Strategic Network Optimization. Events
are individual occurrences which impact the supply chain. Events are created and then
added to scenarios. They specify the find and replace functions which are performed
within the model. Each scenario should have at least one event assigned to it. If you run a
scenario with no events in it, the model baseline solves. Several events can be added to
the same scenario. There are two kinds of events:
Unplanned
Planned
Unplanned events have been added to support Supply Chain Risk Management, they are
complete surprises. They are used when there is no warning that the event will occur. A
sudden change such as a missed supply can have an immediate impact on a company’s
operations. Unplanned events allow you to incorporate the concept of surprise into your
model’s solution. Examples of unplanned events which can massively interrupt supply
chain operations include natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
Planned events are not surprises and there is at least some react time involved. With this
advance warning, there is at least some time to make other supply arrangements and
activate contingency plans. Examples of planned events include seasonal supply chain
interruptions, anticipated shortages, and increases in demand caused by promotions.
Find, Replace, and Find Export are essential tools required by consultants, pre-sales, and
customers. The purposes for initiating any of these utilities are many – from model
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creation, navigation, and data editing to name a few. While each function serves a
distinct purpose, there is some overlap and the fact that they each have similar, yet
different dialogs is confusing. The usability suffers further as the number of modal
dialogs that pop up can be many. For example, a simple Find query with an ensuing
replace opens up to seven dialog boxes which must then be closed. This enhancement
provides the following in SNO:
Combined dialog boxes for Find, Replace, and Find Export
Ability to access the dialog boxes with shortcuts versus the multi-nested menus
Improved usability with a more intuitive graphical user interface
Quick access to common functions in the toolbar
Commonly used functions have been added to the toolbar for easy access. These
include:
Find & Replace
Hide Nodes
Hide Arcs
Fat Arcs
Align Nodes in Columns
Align Nodes in Rows
Select Adjacent nodes
Show/hide map legend
Improved Map Legend
The map legend has been improved to provide the ability to move the legend outside of
the map view to prevent the legend from covering up key areas of the map. The ability
to specify a shape and color has also been added in this release.
Node icons have replaced the dated node symbols to make the nodes easier to identify.
The node color has also been changed to match the color of the application and block
images have been updated in the sample models.
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3.20.2. Release 12.1.2
When setting up a Strategic Plan, assignment sets and lanes are required to be defined for
each item that needs to be considered in a plan. For assignment sets the number of item-
organization combinations can potentially be very large since many of the aggregate
assignment levels are currently not supported. Similarly, when setting up lanes from
organization to customers each individual lane needs to be defined for every item-
organization-customer site-ship method combination. The setup for this can become
very tedious and error prone. A simple example will illustrate the current challenge.
For this small supply chain 2 x 100 x 2 = 400 individual lanes would need to be entered.
The purpose of this enhancement is to ease the set-up required when defining strategic
plans. This is achieved by:
Support all available assignment type levels for input assignment sets.
Support for specificity rules to allow for defaulting. For example, a sourcing rule at
the item-organization level will override a previously defined assignment at the
category-organization level.
Support lane definition for regions or zones
This enhancement will ensure consistency with the other planning products and greatly
improve usability. This will also decrease the number of initial setup problems since the
most common problem is missing one of the many assignments or lanes that need to be
defined.
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3.20.3. Release 12.2
The plan options have been modified to allow the specification of one or more scenario
files (import files) to the plan.
Currently this can only be accomplished on the server side by expert users and requires
access to the server, appropriate server permissions and knowledge of the back end file
structure, scripts, and Strategic Network Optimization batch import commands. Server
side customizations will still be available and is the recommended approach for
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significant customizations. The following diagram illustrates this enhancement in
context of the overall architecture.
Providing the ability to attach scenario files to the plan options will:
• Decrease data and model errors as the appropriate version of the scenario/import
file can be attached to the plan
The new CPLEX version also comes bundled with a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP)
solver which allows SNO to provide better (lower cost) solutions for go/no-go problems,
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including Capital Asset Management. Typical Capital Asset Management problems
include:
Leveraging the MIP algorithm will better align SNO with current cost-driven objectives
used in facility planning.
With this release, a new setup UI has been provided to maintain the integration
parameters and supplemental data. The new setup UI ensures that this information is
readily accessible by users in a central location. Integration parameters have been
classified as to whether the parameter is required or not to assist you with initial setup.
Where possible, validations are performed to ensure accuracy of parameter values.
A publish button is available from the Setup UI to generate text files which will still need
to be uploaded to the ODI server.
If there is more than one pair of alternate bill of material and routing, ranking will be
assigned based on ascending sort sequence of the bill and routing types. For example, if
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A1, A2 and A3 are used, A1 will have a higher rank than A2 which will have a higher
rank than A3.
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