Simulations in Supply Planning
Use simulations to analyze the what-if scenarios in the Supply Planning work area.
The scenarios you re-create and analyze can be for improving the supply chain, to handle an increased demand for a product, or to mitigate an impediment.
- What can be the impact if the processing lead time for an item is reduced from 10 days to 7 days?
- What if the resource capacity is increased to 45 hours per week?
- What’s the effect of a delay from a supplier for an existing supply?
- Can we fulfill on time delivery of items when demand increases due to a large sales opportunity?
Ways to Simulate
You can simulate in two ways:
- By in-plan edits: In this approach, you edit data of an existing plan, with the Do not refresh with current data option selected. You won’t be refreshing the plan. The advantage of this approach is you can forecast a temporary scenario without having to make permanent changes to the plan. If needed, you can save the changes to a simulation set so you can use it in the future.
- By using simulation sets: Use this approach when your changes are long term and need to remain across plan runs. In this approach, you create a simulation set and save it your plan. You’ll need to refresh the plan so that the simulations are saved to the plan and can be used anytime in the future.
Simulation Sets
Simulation sets are a collection of changed data that you would want to include in plan options before running a plan. A simulation set enables you to override the collected data that’s copied into the plan during plan run and see the effect of the changed data. For example, you can test planning results by changing item lead times or order modifiers. You can add simulation sets in Plan Options.
You can add simulation sets in Plan Options and edit the attributes of the following entities before running a simulation:
- Items
- Item Structures
- Resources
- Resource Availability
- Routings
- Routing Resources
- Supplies and Demands
- Suppliers
- Supplier Capacity