Understanding Multifacility Planning
In a multifacility operation, planned orders at the demand facility are the source of demand at the supply facility. You set up and maintain multifacility plans to:
Manage the movement of material through distribution networks and multiple production facilities.
Formalize the process of transferring items among the facilities.
Create internal transfer orders to help ensure traceability of materials and their costs between facilities.
Ensure that the facility from which you are ordering has enough inventory in stock to fill the order or schedule the supply plant to produce it.
Schedule production according to realistic time frames.
Use assembly lines at one plant to begin the assembly of a product and a different plant for final assembly.
Manage all resupply movements throughout the manufacturing network.
Multifacility plans enable greater control of the enterprise. You can define facility relationships at any level of detail for an entire facility, a product group, a master planning family, or an individual item number. In addition, you can incorporate all the facilities into a single plan.
In Material Requirements Planning (MRP), the system transfers items among the manufacturing plants at the component level. The system transfers component items by generating:
Purchase orders at the demand plant for the supply plant.
Sales orders from the demand plant at the supply plant.
In this example, the demand plant (M55) receives components from three different supply plants. Supply plants can also manufacture the end deliverable item. This diagram illustrates multifacility plan:
