Overview of Telescoping Time Buckets

With telescoping time buckets, you determine the low-level time bucket for the near term of your planning horizon. And if you want, you can also determine a different time bucket for the remainder of the planning horizon.

Filtering, graphing, conditional formatting, and setting exception message thresholds all play a part in facilitating plan management by exception. And certainly, the time dimension levels that you select for your tables and graphs help. For example, if you don't need to see plan output in days, then select weeks, periods, or months for your plan output.

You can also use telescoping time buckets to handle information overload. For example, instead of your plan calculating and planning in 100 daily buckets for a 100-day plan, the horizon can be telescoped as follows: The first 1.5 months in 45 daily buckets, and the remaining 2 months in 8 weekly buckets.

Telescoping a plan's planning time buckets reduces granularity of calculation and the number of data points in your plan. By selecting a larger planning time bucket, you eliminate unnecessary plan precision and detail for the entire plan, or just the portion of the horizon beyond the near term. The plan consolidates output into larger time buckets that you determine, such as weekly instead of daily, monthly instead of weekly or daily, and so on. The result is an improved plan runtime performance and visibility further out into the plan without having to scroll as much.

Keep in mind that telescoping does affect the available levels for you to view and edit measure data in a supply plan. In our 45 daily plus 8 weekly buckets planning horizon, if you look beyond day 45 of the supply plan, daily viewing and editing is no longer possible. However, if you view data in a demand and supply plan, you can drill down to the daily level, even if you use telescoping time buckets. This is because demand planning allocates demand measures down to the day level.