Configure Telescoping Buckets in a Supply Plan

You can configure your supply plan to use telescoping buckets. You can set your planning horizon to include only days, weeks, periods, or months. Or you can set your supply planning buckets at two levels of granularity.

For two levels, select a planning horizon that's a combination of daily time buckets and less granular time buckets such as week, period, or month. The planning process calculates detailed plan information for the shorter time horizon (days), and plans the later part of the planning horizon with less granularity. You improve your plan runtime by eliminating unneeded precision and detail for the later parts of the planning horizon.

Before you use telescoping time buckets, think about how many daily time buckets and less granular time buckets you want to use.

To use telescoping buckets, configure the plan parameters for your supply plan.

1. In a Supply Planning, Planning Central, or Demand and Supply Planning work area, open a plan and navigate to the Plan Options page, Scope tab.

2. In the Plan Parameters section on the Scope tab, select a supply planning calendar.

3. Next, select your supply planning buckets. The list of values for the bucket types is determined by the calendar that you specify.

   You can base your planning horizon on days, weeks, periods, or months. Or, you can specify a combination of daily time buckets and then specify less granular time buckets such as weeks, periods, or months. If you use two bucket types, the first bucket type must be Day or Week.

4. Specify the number of buckets for each supply planning bucket.

5. Select Don't create partial buckets to create additional daily buckets in the plan to avoid partial buckets.

   Select this option to ensure that a week, month, or period always starts on the first defined day for that particular week, month, or period. For example, a weekly bucket starts on a Monday when you designate Monday as the week start date. A monthly bucket starts on the first day of the month.

   If you don't select this option, the plan doesn't add any additional daily buckets. Instead, the planning process creates a partial bucket and counts that partial bucket as the first week, period, or month, as specified in the plan options.

   This option is disabled if you select Week-Period combination in Supply Planning Buckets.