Overview of Simulations for Inventory Rebalancing Recommendations

You can edit the dates, quantities, and shipping methods for your inventory rebalancing recommendations and add a planned order of the transfer type. Thereafter, you can simulate the effects of your edits on inventory rebalancing for your replenishment plan.

During simulation, using the Manage Rebalancing Recommendations page, you can make changes to a subset of items within a cluster. Your new or edited planned orders for item-location combinations are considered as firm. While the excess and shortage quantities are computed for these combinations of items, source locations, and destination locations, no new planned orders are generated for these combinations. The rebalancing recommendations are recomputed for the remaining locations for these items in the cluster. The locations for these items in other clusters are also replanned.

Using the Manage Replan Details dialog box, you can further refine the list of the item-location combinations for which you want to run the simulation.

For the replanned item-location combinations, replenishments are automatically recalculated so that data consistency is ensured.

Benefits of Simulations for Inventory Rebalancing

By simulating the effects of your changes to the inventory rebalancing for your replenishment plan, you get these benefits:

• You can effectively respond to changes within your supply chain.

  For example, to cater to a sudden demand, you can add a planned order of the transfer type to move excess inventory from a source location to a destination location. You can then simulate the impact of this change to the inventory rebalancing for other locations in the clusters for the item.

• You can optimize inventory costs within your supply chain.
• You can improve your customer service by moving inventory from locations with excess inventory to locations with inventory shortages.

Additional Points About Simulations for Inventory Rebalancing

Note these additional points about the simulations of changes to inventory rebalancing for your replenishment plan:

• Even if your firm date (suggested ship date) for a new or edited outbound planned order is outside the excess computation window, the planned order is still considered during the calculation of the excess inventory.
• Even if your firm date (suggested due date) for a new or edited inbound planned order is outside the shortage computation window, the planned order is still considered during the calculation of the inventory shortage.
• If the pair of source and destination locations for a newly created planned order is present in more than one cluster, the first cluster is chosen on the basis of the sequence number that you assigned on the Inventory Rebalancing tab on the Plan Options page for the replenishment plan.