Support for Supersession Chains with Bidirectional Relationships

This topic explains how Oracle Replenishment Planning supports policy calculations for supersession chains with bidirectional (reciprocal) relationships.

These points summarize how policy values are calculated in your replenishment plan for item-location combinations in bidirectional supersession chains:

• Oracle Demand Management supports time-phased forecasting for bidirectional supersession chains. The forecasts for the current and latest revisions of an item are based on the demand history for earlier revisions of the item.

  Therefore, when you use a demand plan or forecasting profile for the forecast in your replenishment plan, and the demand plan or forecasting profile supports bidirectional supersession chains, the following happen:

  • The start and end dates for item revisions are calculated and stored in the Item Revision Start Date and Item Revision End Date measures respectively.

    Item-location combinations in a bidirectional supersession chain might not be effective throughout the planning horizon.

  • The forecast is generated for only the periods within which item revisions are effective.

    Item-location combinations in a bidirectional supersession chain might not have forecasts throughout the planning horizon.

  • Policy values are calculated for only the periods within which item revisions are effective.
• In a policy-comparison plan, for an item-location combination in a bidirectional supersession chain, the last policy value that isn't null in a time bucket is taken as the suggested policy value for that time bucket.

  When the suggested policy values are accepted or adjusted, the measures are updated only within the item-location combination's effective dates.

• If item-location level policy overrides are defined in a policy assignment set, they're applicable to an item-location combination in a bidirectional supersession chain only within the effective dates.
• When an aggregate-level policy plan is provided to another replenishment plan, the policies for item-location combinations in bidirectional supersession chains are propagated on the basis of the effective dates.
• When a policy plan is provided to another replenishment plan that's enabled for incremental planning, the policies for item-location combinations in bidirectional supersession chains are propagated on the basis of the effective dates.

Other Points to Note

Note these other points about how policies are calculated in replenishment plans for item-location combinations in bidirectional supersession chains:

• Item revisions with start dates that are beyond the planning horizon or forecast end date or end dates that are before the history start date aren't considered for the forecast.

  Policy values won't be calculated for such item-location combinations in bidirectional supersession chains.

• Policy values will be calculated for item-location combinations in bidirectional supersession relationships only if the Item Revision Start Date and Item Revision End Date measures are correctly populated for the combinations.

  Otherwise, the policy values are calculated for all the time buckets in the planning horizon as is done for other item-location combinations.

• You can generate the forecast in the replenishment plan that you're using to calculate the policy values or provide the forecast through another replenishment or demand plan.

  You can't provide the forecast through an external demand schedule.

• If the effective dates for items in a bidirectional supersession chain are changed, then you must take these steps:
  • If a demand plan is being supplied to the replenishment plan, then the demand plan must be run again with the Refresh with current data option selected in the Run plan drawer. Then, you must run the replenishment plan for which you've selected the Calculate policy parameters and Calculate replenishments checkboxes on the General tab in the Plan definition step in the guided process for editing your plan, and you must select the Refresh with current data option in the Run plan drawer.
  • If you're using a replenishment plan to generate your forecast, you must run the plan with the Refresh with current data option selected in the Run plan drawer. If you're using another replenishment plan to calculate the policy parameters and replenishments, you must run that plan with the Refresh with current data option selected in the Run plan drawer.
• If you override the policy values for an item-location combination for a bidirectional supersession chain in a pivot table that doesn't have the Time dimension and later view the combination in another pivot table that has the Time dimension, the overridden values will appear in all time buckets.

  If you override the policy values for the item-location combination for a bidirectional supersession chain in a pivot table that has the Time dimension, the overridden values appear in only the time buckets for the modifications.