Bulk Plan Partitioning

Bulk plan partitioning enhances the overall performance of the bulk plan run. By partitioning, or grouping, the order releases/order movements into many sets, OTM runs smaller bulk plans on each partition and hence runs faster, even if these smaller bulk plans are run sequentially one after the other. A further boost in performance can be achieved by running several partitioned bulk plans simultaneously in different threads. The multi-threading of the individual portioned bulk plans are automatic and no further configuration is needed.

While it is tempting to consider using the bulk plan partition as a way to keep orders from consolidating, that is not the intent of bulk plan partitioning and is strongly discouraged. To keep orders from consolidating, you can use several business rules in OTM such as location compatibilities, commodity compatibilities etc.

Bulk Plan Partition Setup

There are a couple ways of setting up the partitions:

Manually (or through integration). Enter the partition IDs on the order releases or order movements;
Set up the Partitions and Partition Profiles by accessing the respective screens through Business Process Automation > Power Data > Event Management > Partitions

Partitions

A partition defines a partition ID and a saved query for the order releases or order movements. When an assign partition action is run for a set of order releases, OTM will assign the partition ID for all the orders returned from the saved query.

For example, there is a partition called PA_PARTITION with the partition ID of PA_ORDER, and a saved query to match all orders whose source location is in PA. When running the assign partition for all the orders that start anywhere in the U.S., the assign logic will populate the partition ID on the order releases to PA_ORDER to all orders with source location in PA.

Partition Profiles

A partition profile is an group of partitions ordered by a sequence number. The assign partition logic will work sequentially starting with sequence number 1 and moving up the order. If there are two partitions in the partition profile, as shown below, the assign partition logic will first assign PA_ORDER partition ID to all the orders in PA, and then it will override the partition ID to PHL_ORDER for those orders that start in Philadelphia. All non-Philadelphia orders in PA will still have the partition ID of PA_ORDER.

Partition	Partition ID	Saved Query
PA_PARTITION	PA_ORDER	PA orders
PHL_PARTITION	PHL_ORDER	PHILADELPHIA orders

Assigning Partitions

Once the partitions and partition profiles are setup, the partitions can be assigned to the order releases and order movements through the Assign Partition process.

Note: This action is used to populate the partition ID fields on the orders. However, it is not necessary to run this action as the bulk plan process can be run directly with the partition profiles.

Running Partitioned Bulk Plans

The partitioned bulk plans can only be run through process manager. It works for both order release bulk plans (for both buy and sell) and order movement bulk plans. When a bulk plan is run outside the process manager, all partitions are ignored unless the parameter PARTITION PROFILE ID is defined.

Setting up Order Movement Bulk Plan Process

For the bulk plan order movements process, in the "Based on Order Movements" field, specify a saved query for the collection of the order movements to consider. If the partition profile is selected, then the assign profile logic will be applied to the considered order movements.

As described before, the order movements can be pre-populated with the partition IDs. If you want to bulk plan with the pre-populated partition IDs, you should select the Use Partition check box. The order movements with null partition IDs will be grouped and run together.

Setting up Order Release Bulk Plan Process

To setup and run the bulk plan order releases process, the field "Based on Order Releases" provides the saved query for the set of order releases to consider for planning. The partition assignment is done on this set of order releases. The Use Partition check box is used to take the partitions on the order releases for the partitioned bulk plan. The orders releases with null partitions will be processed together in one bulk plan run.