Implementation: Plan Definition and Modeling

Step 6: Plan Definition and Modeling

You must decide whether to use unconstrained or constrained plans and set the plan options.

Responsibility and Menus

The seeded responsibility for Rapid Planning planners is Supply Chain Simulation Planner.

It displays these menus:

• Plans, Inputs, and Simulations: The Rapid Planning workbench.

• Collections: Move execution system data to the planning server.

• Sourcing; Specify where item come from.

• Setup

• Other

Unconstrained and Constrained Plans

You can run unconstrained or constrained supply chain plans.

Unconstrained Plans

An unconstrained plan:

• Assumes infinite material and resource capacity.

• Overloads resource and supplier capacity.

• Backwards schedules resources from the demand due date. It schedules past due resource requirements on the plan run date using compression days. It does not use planning unit of work.

• Aligns supplies with demand need by dates.

• Issues exception messages related to lead time, material, and resource capacity overload risks.

Use unconstrained plans if you:

• Have few material and resource capacity constraints

• Want to know when and how much capacity you need to meet all the demands on time

• Want to see the supplies that do not have enough lead time

To learn how the planning solver plans unconstrained plans, see these topics:

• Items to Plan

• General Planning Solver Scheduling

• Lead-time

• Supply Scheduling

Constrained Plans

A constrained plan:

• Balances capacity while meeting customer demand

• Plans around material, resource, and supplier resource constraints using planning unit of work.

  It does not use compression days.

Use constrained plans if you want the plan to:

• Plan around capacity constraints for resources, suppliers, and lead time

• Schedule supplies with realistic completion

• Calculate the quantity of an item that you can produce to daily capacity

• Issue exception messages to indicate constraints on the plan results

To learn how the planning solver plans unconstrained plans, see these topics:

• Items to Plan

• General Planning Solver Scheduling

• Lead-time

• Default Order Sizing and Planning Unit of Work

Items to Plan

This topic applies to unconstrained and constrained plans.

There are two plan options that determine the items that are included in the plan.

Planned Item Type: Specifies the subset of items that the planning engine should plan in a particular plan run.

• MPS Planned: Include items with Planning Method of MPS Planned and MPS/MPP Planned

• MPP Planned: Include items with Planning Method of MPP Planned , MPS/MPP Planned, and MRP/MPP Planned

• MRP Planned: Include all planned items, that is, include all items unless Planning Method is Not Planned

• Distribution Planned: Include all items that are Distribution Planned. There is no separate distribution planning logic in Oracle Rapid Planning.

For Rapid Planning plans, you:

• Can use supply chain planning methods Master Production Schedule (MPS) and Material Requirements Plans (MRP):

• Cannot use the distribution planning methods Master Production Plans (MPP) and Distribution Plans (DRP)

Planned Items: Specifies the types of items that the planning engine should plan in a particular plan run:

• All Planned Items

• Demand Schedule items only: Only plan items that have demands. If the demand schedule includes substitute items, the planning solver plans them. If plan option Include Sales Orders is selected, include only sales orders against those items found in demand schedules.

• Demand Schedule and WIP components

• Demand Schedule Items and all sales orders: Plan all items that have demands as well as all items that have sales orders against them.

• Demand Schedule Items, WIP components and all sales orders

The largest possible item list is a plan where you select:

• Planned Item Type: MRP Planned

• Planned Items: All Planned Items

General Planning Solver Features

This topic applies to unconstrained and constrained plans.

It follows the item-organization Planning Time Fence:

• It does not set any planned order Suggested Due Dates earlier than Planning Time Fence Date.

• The planning engine uses Due Date to determine if the supply is earlier than, later than, or on Planning Time Fence Date.

• When planning for a firm supply, any upstream supplies can violate the planning time fence to be on time for the firm supply.

For profile option MSO: Firm Work Orders/Operations Within Time Fence, it always uses Yes, the default setting.

It follows the Demand Time Fence and the Release Time Fence.

It follows firm flags on supplies.

For planned orders, it does not select alternate BOM/Routings, alternate resources, alternate suppliers, alternate source orgs, substitute components and end item substitutes.

For scheduled receipts that use alternates, it does not change the alternate selection.

It follows order modifiers.

For definitions of these concepts, see Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning Implementation and User's Guide.

Lead-time

Lead-time Introduction

Lead-times are portions of the span of time from recognizing the need for an order to receiving the goods to inventory.

This topic reviews the lead-times that the planing process uses to plan and schedule. It also explains concurrent processes, profile options, plan options, and planning parameters that affect lead-time calculations.

Setting Lead-times

Set lead-time values for the planning process to use in the following source system forms:

• Source instance > Oracle Inventory > Organization items form > Item attributes > Lead-time tabbed region

• Source instance > Oracle Purchasing > Approved Supplier List form

• Destination instance > Item Attributes Mass Maintenance form

The planning process does not use subinventory lead-times from Oracle Inventory. These values are for the Oracle Inventory Min-Max planning process.

Lead-time Item Attributes

This topic describes the lead-time item attributes. You define them:

• For each organization and not for the master organization

• In work days from the manufacturing calendar

For more information, see Oracle Inventory User's Guide.

Lead-time Item Attributes Definition

You can enter the following lead-time item attributes:

• Preprocessing: The time required to place a purchase order or create a discrete job or schedule. This is also known as the paperwork or planning time.

• Fixed: The time required to complete the tasks to make an assembly that are independent of order quantity, for example, setup, fixed run time, or teardown times.

• Variable: The time required to complete the tasks to make an assembly that depend on order quantity, for example, run time. Oracle Bills of Material concurrent processes calculate this time.

• Lead Time Lot Size: The typical quantity of the item that you buy, make or transfer. The default value is item attribute Standard Lot Size (set by Oracle Cost Management).

  Oracle Bills of Material concurrent process Calculate Manufacturing Lead Time uses this value to compute Processing.

• Processing: The time required for a supplier or your transfer from facility to deliver an item to your receiving dock or for you to manufacture an item. For make items, this is also known as manufacturing lead-time. For buy and transfer items, it includes in-transit time to your facility.

  For transfer items, the planning engine only takes this lead time into account if the item is not planned at your source organization, If the item is planned at the source organization, the planning engine uses the lead times from the source organization.

• Postprocessing: For buy and transfer items, the time to receive from the receiving dock to inventory or for a make item from production to inventory.

  For make items, the time to receive from production to inventory. It includes post-production activities that you don't model in the item routing, for example, quality control analysis and shipping preparation activities. The planning process adds this time to work orders that you have collected. Set it in the Item Attributes Mass Maintenance window, do not set it in the source using the Item Attributes window. By-products and coproducts cannot have Postprocessing lead time.

• Cumulative Manufacturing: For make items, the time required to make the item if you have all of the buy items in inventory and have to make all subassemblies and the item itself.

• Cumulative Total: For make items, the time required to make the item if you have to purchase all of the buy items, make all subassemblies, and make the item itself.

Lead-times and Order Dates

The lead-times define dates that are associated with planned orders and scheduled receipts for these items:

• Order date: The beginning of Preprocessing the date you should begin the processing to release the order.

• Start date: The end of Preprocessing and beginning of Processing; the date you, your supplier, or your ship from facility should begin work on the order.

• Dock date: The end of Processing and the beginning of Postprocessing. For buy and transfer orders, the date that the material should be on your receiving dock. For make orders, the date that you should finish the operations. The supply of a by-product and a coproduct is ready for downstream consumption on the dock date.

• Due date: The end of Postprocessing and the date that the material should be in your inventory. For make orders, put the on-hand on hold to account for the post processing lead time.

Lead-time Item Attributes and Lead Time Calculation Concurrent Processes

If you run the following Oracle Bills of Material concurrent processes, they can update lead-time values that you may have manually set:

• Calculate Manufacturing Lead Time

• Calculate Cumulative Lead Time

• Rollup Cumulative Lead Time

These concurrent processes update the following lead-time item attribute fields:

• Fixed: Oracle Bills of Material concurrent process Calculate Manufacturing Lead Time calculates this time and update your manual entry for make items. It sums the values in field Usage for lot-based, scheduled resources.

• Variable: Oracle Bills of Material concurrent process Calculate Manufacturing Lead Times calculates this time and update your manual entry for make items. It sums the values in field Usage for item-based, scheduled resources.

• Processing: The Oracle Bills of Material lead-time concurrent process Calculate Manufacturing Lead Time calculates this time and replaces your manual entry for make items. It uses calculation Fixed + (Variable * Lead Time Lot Size); if Lead Time Lot Size does not have a value, it uses 1.

• Cumulative Manufacturing: The Oracle Bills of Material lead-time concurrent processes Calculate Cumulative Lead Time and Rollup Cumulative Lead Time calculates this time and replace your manual entry. For an assembly, they take each component's cumulative lead-time and subtract its operation lead-time offset in the assembly's routing. Then, they take the manufacturing lead-time of the assembly and add the largest adjusted cumulative manufacturing lead-time of its components.

• Cumulative Total: The Oracle Bills of Material lead-time concurrent processes Calculate Cumulative Lead Time and Rollup Cumulative Lead Time calculate this time and replace your manual entry. For an assembly, they take each component's cumulative lead-time and subtract its operation lead-time offset in the assembly's routing. Then, they take the manufacturing lead-time of the assembly, add the largest adjusted cumulative manufacturing lead-time of its components, and add the longest buy part lead-time of its components.

Decimal lead-time quantities denote times less then one day and are the result of the lead-time divided by 24 hours.

For more information, see Oracle Bills of Material User's Guide.

Safety Lead Time

Safety lead-time is a lead-time that you add to the normal lead-time of make and buy items. You use it to instruct the planning process to schedule supplies in advance of the demand due dates that peg to them for the purposes of:

• Having an inventory buffer to protecting against fluctuations in lead-time, demand (for example, forecast error), and supply (for example, variable supplier lead times and irregular operation yields)

• Providing a time buffer to recover from fluctuations by taking longer to manufacture the original units or by manufacturing more units either to handle increased demand or to replace unsuitable parts from the original supply run

Safety lead-time is sometimes referred to as protection time or safety time

You can also complete supplies earlier than the demands that peg to them using transient safety stock levels. See the section Safety Stock in the Oracle Advanced Supply Chaining Planning Implementation and User's Guide. Use safety stock lead-time instead of transient safety stock if you want to have:

• Lower average inventory level: Safety lead-time creates less excess supply because it creates safety stock from supplies pegged to actual demands rather than to additional safety stock level demands

• Less late-satisfied demands: There are no supplies pegged to additional safety stock level demands that compete against actual demands for manufacturing and supplier capacity

Safety stock lead-time is:

• Used in constraint-based planning and is not available for unconstrained planning

• A soft constraint. If hard constraints prevent moving the supply due date to honor the safety lead-time, the planning process will not honor the safety lead-time

To set safety lead time:

• Set profile option MSO: Use Safety Lead Time to Yes

• For each item-organization, set item attribute Safety Stock Method to MRP Planned % then, in item attribute Safety Stock Percent, enter safety lead-time in days.

When the planning engine schedules a supply subject to safety lead-time, it:

• Creates planned orders based on demands

• Pegs demands to these supplies and uses them to cover transient safety stock requirements

• Ignores safety lead-time in forward scheduling so as to meet demand due date

• Inflates the lead-time by the safety lead-time in backward scheduling to plan for receipt to stock.

This example shows how to analyze plan information for items subject to safety lead-time:

• In the diagram, SS means safety stock and PAB means projected available balance.

• Profile option MSO: Use Safety Lead Time = Yes

• Item attribute Safety Stock Method = MRP Planned %

• Item attribute Safety Stock Bucket Days = 5

• Item attribute Safety Stock Percent = 200% = 2 days

• The planning engine ignored transient safety stock, pegged supplies to actual demands, and scheduled supplies two days earlier than the demand due dates of the demands that peg to them.

• Planned orders on day 4 are for quantities 400, 400, and 200.

• The first planned order of quantity 400 on day 4 is against the transient safety stock of quantity 400 on day 1.

• The second planned order of quantity 400 is against the increase in the transient safety stock to quantity 800 on day 3.

• A third planned order of quantity 400 is against the increase in the transient safety stock to quantity 1200 on day 5. The planning engine splits the planned order of quantity 400 into two planned orders of quantity 200 (according to profile option MSO: Demand Size Tolerance Before Splitting Planned Orders). The demand on day 6 pegs to one planned order of quantity 200; the demand on day 8 pegs to the other planned order of quantity 200.

This example shows the plan information for the same demand position but using non-transient/transient safety stock planning. In the diagram, SS means safety stock and PAB means projected available balance.

If you use safety lead-time:

• You might accumulate too much material too early. However, resource constraints reduce the possibility. By using safety lead-time planning, the risk of accumulation should be lower than by using non-transient/transient safety stock planning.

• The planning process might suggest that you delay lower priority demands in order to meet safety lead-time

Lead-time Item Attribute Notes

You can also view Preprocessing, Processing, Postprocessing, Fixed, and Variable among the items information.

The planning engine does not use Cumulative Manufacturing and Cumulative Total values. You may see them in lists of values when you are entering lead-times, for example, item attribute Planning Time Fence.

Total lead-time is not an item attribute. The planning process calculates it in unconstrained plans to determine an order's Order Date. It:

• Begins with the order's Due Date

• Calculates total lead-time for the order as item Fixed + (Variable * Order quantity)

• Adds Preprocessing to calculate the order's Order Date

The Calculate Manufacturing Lead-time concurrent process uses the same general calculation for Processing as the planning process uses for Total Lead-time. The Calculate Manufacturing Lead-time concurrent process uses item attribute Lead-time Lot Size to calculate item attribute Processing. The planning process uses actual order quantity to calculate the processing time for a specific planned order or scheduled receipt.

This diagram shows the relative use of Total Lead-time, Cumulative Manufacturing, and Cumulative Total.

Calculations of Cumulative Lead-time Attributes

Calculated Supply Dates

For all plan types, the planning process schedules planned orders and scheduled receipts based on Demand Due Date of the demand that the supply is pegged to. It calculates these dates:

• Need By Date: The earliest demand due date of all demands pegged to a supply. This does not apply to purchase orders, as the need by date for purchase orders is the collected date from purchasing.

• Suggested Due Date: The date by which the supply is available for use by its demand. In an Unconstrained or Constrained - Enforce demand due dates plan this is the same as Need By Date. In a Constrained - Enforce capacity constraints plan this is the scheduled availability date of the supply.

• Suggested Dock Date: For buy or transfer orders, the date the order arrives on your receiving dock.

• Suggested Ship Date: For transfer orders, the date of departure from the source organization of the last transport used for the transfer.

• Suggested Start Date: The date that you, your supplier, or your ship from facility should begin work on the order

• Suggested Order Date: The date by which you need to place the order. For a scheduled receipt, this field displays the date the date that it was created.

Old Due Date, Old Dock Date, and Original Need By Date are the original dates from the source system for scheduled receipts.

You can view these dates among the supply and demand information.

Calculating Planned Order Demand Due Date

The planning process takes into account the actual requirement date and the lead-times for calculating the planned order demand due dates. This provides more accurate lead-time offsets in aggregate planning time buckets.

It allows you to plan at aggregate time bucket levels like periods and weeks. It provides you easy identification of aggregate supply/demand mismatches and helps you make strategic decisions related to equipment and labor acquisition, sourcing etc. without generating needless details.

The planning process calculates the planned order demand due dates for dependent demands based on the actual requirement date with respect to lead-time. It saves the calculated requirement date based on the lead-time value for subsequent calculation.

Then, it aligns all dates to the ends of time buckets. You can get more accurate dates by first performing dependent demand explosion followed by alignment.

Example

Consider an organization with an assembly A, which has components B and C.

Assembly

The quantity per assembly for components B and C is 1.

The lead-time for assembly A = 4

The lead-time for sub-assembly B = 3

The lead-time for component C = 4

The organization follows a weekly planning bucket and working days are Monday through Friday.

An order quantity of 1 is placed for item A on Friday February 28.

The planning process generates the following planned order demands:

Planned Order Demand Due Date Calculation

Explanation:

• Calculated requirement date for B

  = Demand Due Date for A - LT

  = February 28 - 4 days

  = February 24 (Monday)

• Demand Due Date for B

  = Calculated requirement date for B after bucketing into planning bucket

  = February 28 (weekly demands are bucketed into Friday)

• Calculated requirement date for C

  = Calculated requirement for B - LT

  = February 24 - 4 days

  = February 18 (Monday)

• Demand Due Date for C

  = Calculated requirement date for C after bucketing into planning bucket

  = February 21 (weekly demands are bucketed into Friday)

Date Calculations for Manufactured Supplies

The planning process uses work days from the manufacturing calendar to calculate dates for manufactured supplies, unless otherwise indicated.

Need By Date: The date that the material should ship or be in inventory for a next-higher level assembly. The earliest demand due date that the supply is pegged to.

Suggested Due Date: In an Unconstrained or Constrained - Enforce demand due dates plan this is the same as Need By Date. In a Constrained - Enforce capacity constraints plan this is the scheduled availability date of the supply. If the supply is constrained, the planning process forward schedules from the constraint.

Suggested Dock Date: Demand Due Date. Dock Date is the day by which all shop floor operations are complete.

Suggested Ship Date: Blank

Suggested Start Date: Suggested Due Date - Production duration. The day that you should begin shop floor operations.

Lead-time offsetting begins only on a workday of the workday calendar. For example:

• The workday calendar shows the week of 15 January as 5 workdays (Monday 15 January to Friday 19 January) followed by 2 non-workdays (Saturday 20 January to Sunday 21 January).

• The planning process creates a planned order against item A for quantity 45 with suggested ship date 20 January. Processing lead-time for item A is 5 days.

• Since 20 January is a non-workday, the planning process moves to 19 January to begin lead-time offsetting and calculates Suggested Start Date 12 January.

  Sunday 21 January (non-workday)

  Monday 20 January (non-workday) > Suggested Ship Date

  Friday 19 January > Beginning of lead-time offsetting

  Thursday 18 January > -1

  Wednesday 17 January > -2

  Tuesday 16 January > -3

  Monday 15-January > -4

  Sunday 14 January (non-workday)

  Saturday 13 January (non-workday)

  Friday 12 January > -5 and Suggested Start Date

  Thursday 11 January

Production Duration:

• Unconstrained plans: Fixed + (Variable * Order quantity)

• Constrained plans: Calculated resource and material duration. If the item does not have a routing, the planning process uses the unconstrained calculation.

Suggested Order Date: Planned order Start Date - Preprocessing. The date on which you should place the order. For a scheduled receipt, this field displays the date the date that it was created.

This diagram shows dates calculated for manufacturing supplies.

Dates Calculated for Manufacturing Supplies

Date Calculations for Manufactured Supply Components

The planning process calculates the component due dates of a manufacturing supply order according to your setting of the plan option Material Scheduling Method.

For value Order Start Date, the component due date is the supply Start Date.

For value Operation Start Date:

• Unconstrained plans: The planning process determines the operation that uses the component. It begins with the supply Start Date and increases it by lead-time % of that operation.

• Constrained plans: Operation Start Date for the operation which uses it

Purchased Supply Lead-times and Approved Supplier Lists

If the item of the purchased supply has an Approved Supplier List, the planning process uses:

• Uses its Processing Lead-time value instead of the item attribute Processing lead-time

• Adjusts Dock Date to conform to its Delivery Calendar value

You can view Approved Supplier List planning attributes among the items information.

Date Calculations for Purchased Supplies

The planning process uses work days from the receiving organization calendar to calculate dates for purchased supplies, unless otherwise indicated.

Need by Date: Date that the material is required to satisfy demand.

Suggested Due Date:

• Unconstrained plans: Need by Date

• Constrained plans: The available date of the supply by forward scheduling

Suggested Dock Date:

• Unconstrained plans: Due Date - Postprocessing

• Constrained plans: The latest delivery day for which the capacity is available and the material is needed

• If the purchased supply item has an Approved Supplier List delivery calendar: The planning process verifies that the Suggested Dock Date is a work day on the delivery calendar. If it is not, the planning solver changes Suggested Due Date to the next earliest working day of the delivery calendar.

Suggested Ship Date: Dock Date - Production duration

Production Duration:

• If the purchased supply item has an Approved Supplier List Supplier Processing lead-time: Approved Supplier List Supplier Processing lead-time

• If the purchased supply item does not have an Approved Supplier List Supplier Processing lead-time: Item attribute Processing

Suggested Start Date: Ship Date

Suggested Order Date: Start Date - Preprocessing. For a scheduled receipt, this field displays the date the date that it was created. For collected information, purchase order create date. The planning process calculates this date using the organization manufacturing calendar.

This diagram shows the calculations for purchased supplies.

Calculated Dates for Purchased Supplies

Date Calculations for Transfer Supplies

The planning process uses work days from the receiving organization calendar and shipping organization calendar to calculate dates for transfer supplies.

Need By Date (receiving organization calendar): Date material is required to satisfy demand.

Demand Due Date (receiving organization calendar):

• Unconstrained plans: Need By Date

• Constrained plans: Forward scheduling from the constraint.

Suggested Dock Date (receiving organization calendar): Due Date - Postprocessing

Suggested Ship Date (shipping organization calendar):

• Unconstrained plans: Dock Date - Intransit Time

• Constrained plans: Dock Date - Intransit Time, considering constrained transportation duration. The planning process considers transportation constraint maximum transfer quantity per day

  Intransit Time is calendar days.

Suggested Start Date (shipping organization calendar):

• Unconstrained plans: Ship Date - Processing

• Constrained plans: Ship Date. The planning process does not consider a build time because the supply may be on-hand.

Suggested Order Date (receiving organization calendar):

• Unconstrained plans: Planned order Start Date - Preprocessing

• Constrained plans: Ship date in the receiving organization, if the shipping organization is a planned organization. The constrained plan uses material and resource constraints in the shipping organization.

For a scheduled receipt, this field displays the date the date that it was created.

This diagram shows calculated dates for transfer supplies in an unconstrained plan. The planning process calculates production duration differently for the source organization and the destination organizations; therefore, the dates in your plan may not line up as accurately as they appear in this diagram. If material is scheduled inside of these lead-times, planners can determine what action to take on the compression messages.

Calculated Dates for Transfer Supplies, Unconstrained Plan

This diagram shows that, in constrained plans, Need By Date and Demand Due Date in the shipping organization should be the same as planned order Ship Date in the shipping organization.

Calculated Dates for Transfer Supplies, Constrained Plan

Supply Scheduling

This topic applies to unconstrained plans only. For constrained plans, see Default Order Sizing and Planning Unit of Work.

Resources and Suppliers

The planning solver overloads resource and supplier capacity.

It does not schedule resources earlier to minimize resource overload.

It backward schedules resources based on duration when required to meet the make order due date.

During backwards scheduling, when it reaches the plan run date, it schedules all earlier resources on the plan run date.

It issues exception messages for resource capacity overloads, supplier capacity overloads, and lead time violations.

If it calculates resource requirements, it issues exception messages Sales order / forecast at risk due to a material shortage and Sales order / forecast at risk due to a resource shortage.

Compression Days

Compression occurs when the planning engine detects that a supply order needs to be completed in less time that its minimum processing time in order for it to meet a demand. If the planning engine plans the order according to its lead-time, it would start in the past (before the planning horizon start date). Compression days is the number of days the planning process suggests you reduce the time between the start date and the due date).

Make Orders

For schedule and reschedule of WIP jobs and planned orders for make items, the planning solver compresses the first several operations of the make order. The operation start dates and end dates are the plan run date.

Compression begins at pre-processing lead time. The planning solver compresses each successive operation to no duration until there is sufficient lead time for the remaining operations to complete using their resource durations.

Buy and Transfer Orders

For schedule and reschedule purchase orders and purchase requisitions and planned orders for purchased items, the planning solver compresses pre-processing lead time, then processing lead time, then post processing lead time until there is sufficient lead time for the order to complete using the lead times.

Default Order Sizing and Planning Unit of Work

This topic applies to constrained plans only. For unconstrained plans, see Supply Scheduling.

Default order sizing creates manageable manufacturing order sizes that are both efficient for scheduling resource usage and are efficient to produce.

Order sizes that are too small create shop floor inefficiencies while order sizes that are too large are difficult to schedule, can cause supplies to be late for demands and usually leave significant amounts of unconsumed resource capacity.

To invoke default order sizing, you specify a planning unit of work--a few hours, a shift, a day, or a larger time bucket.

Planning Unit of Work

Planning Unit of Work is an item-organization attribute that you specify in hours.

Oracle Rapid Planning uses planning unit of work to determine the order size. Order size is how many units you can produce within the planning unit of work time.

For example:

• Since the planning solver considers daily capacities, you can decide that it should create planned orders with quantity equal to one production day. In other words, because Oracle Rapid Planning only considers daily capacities, then Oracle Rapid Planning should create units of work that take a full production day.

• If you want long production runs, set the planning unit of work, for example, to two to three days or two to three weeks duration.

The planning solver uses planning unit of work for constrained planning; for unconstrained planning, it uses lead time. It uses planning unit of work to fix the lead time for planned orders so it can quickly arrive at a feasible daily schedule.

Planning Unit of Work Size

The planning unit of work order size is the number of units of an item that you can produce during the planning unit of work time. The planning solver calculates it for each primary and alternate routing by dividing the planning unit of work by the routing lead time. If you use rounding control, the calculation rounds the planning unit of work order size up.

If you have not defined a Planning Unit of Work, then Oracle Rapid Planning uses order size quantities that can be produced in a day, depending on resource and material availability.

Resources and Planning Unit of Work

The planning solver:

• Applies planning unit of work

• Splits resource requirements

• Consumes resource requirements

Resources and Planning Unit of Work: Applying Planning Unit of Work

The planning solver backward schedules the resource requirements from the job end time.

The planning solver uses the operation lead time for each operation if resources are available within the time that the lead time covers. For example, if the lead time is 10 hours with 8 hour per day shifts, the lead time spans two days. If the resource requirement is 10 hours using a single assigned unit, then resource capacity usage each day can be anything from 2 to 8 hours. Fixed lead time is the time required to make one unit.

If the planning solver has to move the operation to an earlier day, it schedules to reflect the resource usage on that day. For example:

• There is four hours of available capacity in the second day of the operation

• The planning solver schedules four hours on the second day

• The planning solver schedules six hours on the previous day

Resources and Planning Unit of Work: Splitting Resource Requirements

This is how the planning solver splits resource requirements across daily buckets:

• For resource requirements of two hours or less, it can split them over two contiguous daily buckets. It searches for a bucket with at least two hours available capacity and schedules the remainder of the resource requirement in a contiguous bucket.

• For resource requirements more than two hours, it schedules them in a daily bucket

For example:

• The resource requirement is 4 hours

• The planning solver looks for a bucket that has at least 2 hours (half the requirement).

• It finds 3.5 hours in a daily bucket

• It looks in the daily bucket before and after to find the remaining 0.5 hour.

Resources and Planning Unit of Work: Consuming Resource Availability

This example shows how the planning solver consumes resources with daily buckets.

Resource availability:

• Resource A: 8 hours per day

• Resource B: 8 hours per day

Routing:

• Operation 1: Uses resource A; resource requirement = 0.25 hour

• Operation 2: Uses resource B; resource requirement = 0.25 hour

Lead time = 0.5 hour [0.25 + 0.25]

Planning unit of work = 16 hours

Planning unit of work order size = 32 [16 / 0.5], you can produce 32 units in 16 hours

For any planned order quantity from 1 to 32 units, total lead time = 16 hours

• Operation 1 lead time = 8 hours

• Operation 2 lead time = 8 hours

Demand

• Quantity: 60 units

• Due date: Day 8

This diagram shows that the planning solver schedules these planned orders:

• Quantity = 20 units, days 1 and 2, lead time = 16 hours

• Quantity = 8 units, days 5 and 6, lead time = 16 hours

• Quantity = 32 units, days 7 and 8, lead time = 16 hours

For the planned order for quantity 32, the planning solver could schedule the operations on the same day:

• Day 8: Operation 1, 8 hours consumed [32 * 0.25]

• Day 8: Operation 2, 8 hours consumed

For the planned order for quantity 32, the planning solver could schedule the operations on different contiguous days:

• Day 7: Operation 1, 8 hours consumed

• Day 8: Operation 2, 8 hours consumed

For the planned order for quantity 32, the planning solver could schedule the operations on different non-contiguous days:

• Day 6: Operation 1. 8 hours consumed

• Day 8: Operation 2, 8 hours consumed

For the planned order for quantity 4, the planning solver could schedule the operations on the same day:

• Day 8: Operation 1, 1 hour consumed [4 * 0.25]

• Day 8: Operation 2, 1 hour consumed

Order Modifiers

The planning solver uses these rules to decide planned order sizes when there are conflicts between planning unit of work size and order modifiers:

• If fixed days supply is higher than the planning unit of work size, use fixed days supply.

• If fixed lot multiplier is higher than the planning unit of work size, use fixed lot multiplier.

• If minimum order quantity is higher than the planning unit of work size, use minimum order quantity.

• If maximum order quantity is lower than the planning unit of work size, use maximum order quantity.

• If there is a fixed order quantity, use it. All planned orders have the same lead time and same quantity.

Key Plan Options

See Plan Options.

Plan Life Cycle Actions

When you select a plan in the Plans region, you can see its information.

This table shows the life cycle of each plan.

Action	Plan State
Create Plan	Created
Launch Plan	Successfully launched
Load Plan	Loaded in memory, available for update
Close Plan	Closed, not in memory
Save Plan	Saved to database from memory
Delete Plan	Delete plan from memory and database