oracle rcd document 12.1.1 to 12.1.3

ORACLE E-BUSINESS SUITE RELEASE CONTENT DOCUMENT Value Chain Planning Release 12.1 (through 12.1.3)

Prepared by the VCP Product Management and Strategy Teams Last Updated: July 9, 2010

Version: 4.0 Copyright © 2010 Oracle Corporation All Rights Reserved

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document ii

Table of Contents

1. Disclaimer 1

2. Introduction 2

2.1. Purpose of Document 2

3. New and Changed Features in Value Chain Planning 3

3.1. Collections 3 3.1.1. Release 12.1.1 3

3.1.1.1. Backward Compatibility to 11i10 3

3.2. Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center – New Product 3 3.2.1. Product Overview 3 3.2.2. Release 12.1.1 4

3.2.2.1. Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard 4 3.2.2.2. Supply Chain Analyst Dashboard 5 3.2.2.3. Analytical Framework 6 3.2.2.4. Scenario Management 7 3.2.2.5. Supply Chain Planning Web Services 7 3.2.2.6. Seeded BPEL Processes 7 3.2.2.7. Process Automation 8 3.2.2.8. Activity Management 8

3.2.3. Release 12.1.2 8 3.2.3.1. Compatibility with 11.5.10 Planning Server 8 3.2.3.2. Integration to Third Party Planning Systems 9 3.2.3.3. Ability to Run APCC Standalone 9 3.2.3.4. Rich User Interface Enhancements 9

3.2.4. Release 12.1.3 9 3.2.4.1. Analysis of Inventory and Service Levels 9 3.2.4.2. Analysis of Excess and Obsolescence 10 3.2.4.3. Enhanced Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard 10 3.2.4.4. Supply Chain Risk Management Dashboard 11 3.2.4.5. Revenue Gap Analysis 11 3.2.4.6. Collaboration Workspaces for Unstructured Collaboration 12 3.2.4.7. Enhanced Exceptions Analysis 12 3.2.4.8. Integration with Rapid Planning 12 3.2.4.9. Plan Versus Collected Data Comparison 13

3.3. Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning 13 3.3.1. Release 12.1.1 13

3.3.1.1. Oracle Transportation Management Integration 13 3.3.1.2. Optimization Enhancements 13 3.3.1.3. Contiguous Processing 14 3.3.1.4. Minimum Remaining Shelf Life 14 3.3.1.5. Distribution Planning Scalability Enhancements 14 3.3.1.6. End Item Substitution Enhancements 15 3.3.1.7. Production Schedules as Inputs 15

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document iii

3.3.1.8. Safety Lead Time 15 3.3.1.9. Customization of Horizontal Plan 15 3.3.1.10. Supply Tolerancing Enhancements 16 3.3.1.11. Buy Order Processing Lead Time Backward Compatibility 16

3.3.2. Release 12.1.2 16 3.3.2.1. Release Recommendations for Internal Requisitions 16 3.3.2.2. Turn Off Planned Order Creation 17 3.3.2.3. Consume Purchase Orders in First In, First Out Sequence 17

3.3.3. Release 12.1.3 17 3.3.3.1. Forecast Spreading Based on Shipping Calendar 17 3.3.3.1. Excluding Planned Orders from Supply Tolerancing 18 3.3.3.2. Maximize Use-Up of Substitute Components 19 3.3.3.3. Distribution Planning Enhanced Order Modifier Support 20

3.4. Oracle Collaborative Planning 21 3.4.1. Release 12.1.1 21

3.4.1.1. Export Exception Details 21 3.4.1.2. Detailed Supply Commit Based on ASCP Pegging 21 3.4.1.3. Search Exceptions by Buyer and Planner 21

3.4.2. Release 12.1.2 21 3.4.2.1. Rich User Interface Enhancements 21

3.4.3. Release 12.1.3 21

3.5. Oracle Demand Planning 21 3.5.1. Release 12.1.1 21

3.5.1.1. Clear Data in Worksheets 21 3.5.1.2. Default Even Allocation Over Time 22 3.5.1.3. Plan Security by Responsibility and Organization 22 3.5.1.4. Sort by Product in Planning Percentages Worksheet 22 3.5.1.5. Data Selection Tools for Region Copy Selector 22 3.5.1.6. Prevent Planners from Editing Measures in View Scope 22

3.5.2. Release 12.1.2 22 3.5.3. Release 12.1.3 22

3.6. Oracle Demand Signal Repository – New Product 23 3.6.1. Product Overview 23 3.6.2. Release 12.1.1 23

3.6.2.1. Customer Organization Hierarchy 23 3.6.2.2. Multiple Calendar Support 24 3.6.2.3. Customer Item Hierarchy 24 3.6.2.4. Manufacturer Item Hierarchy 24 3.6.2.5. Multiple Currency Support 24 3.6.2.6. Alternate Units of Measure 25 3.6.2.7. Authorized Distribution 25 3.6.2.8. Sales Allocation 25 3.6.2.9. Sales Facts 25 3.6.2.10. Shipments 25 3.6.2.11. Orders 26 3.6.2.12. Inventory 26 3.6.2.13. Sales Forecasts 26 3.6.2.14. Promotion Plans 26 3.6.2.15. Category Sales Analysis Dashboard 26 3.6.2.16. Product to Category Coverage Reports 26 3.6.2.17. Category Growth Analysis Reports 27 3.6.2.18. Category Sales by Type Reports 27 3.6.2.19. Average Price Analysis Report 27 3.6.2.20. Top and Bottom Performers Reports 27 3.6.2.21. Ad-Hoc Reporting 28 3.6.2.22. Sales Scorecard 28 3.6.2.23. Supply Chain Scorecard 28

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document iv

3.6.2.24. Operations Scorecard 29 3.6.2.25. Demantra Demand Management Integration 29 3.6.2.26. Retail Merchandising System (RMS) Integration 29 3.6.2.27. Web Services Integration 29

3.6.3. Release 12.1.2 29 3.6.3.1. Exception Management Dashboard 29 3.6.3.2. All Commodity Volume (ACV) / External Measures 30 3.6.3.3. TDLinx Store/Outlet Adapter 31 3.6.3.4. Scorecard Enhancements (Goals & Thresholds) 31 3.6.3.5. Store Clusters 32

3.6.4. Release 12.1.3 32 3.6.4.1. Manufacturer Promotions 32 3.6.4.2. Manufacturer Shipments 33 3.6.4.3. Customer Shipment Facts 33 3.6.4.4. Third Party Distributors 33 3.6.4.5. Alternate Organization Hierarchy 34 3.6.4.6. Forecast Type and Purpose Code 36 3.6.4.7. User Defined Fields 36 3.6.4.8. Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimensions 37 3.6.4.9. Item Clusters 37 3.6.4.10. Replenishment Rules 38 3.6.4.11. Allocation Rules 39

3.7. Oracle Global Order Promising 39 3.7.1. Release 12.1.1 39 3.7.2. Release 12.1.2 39 3.7.3. Release 12.1.3 39

3.7.3.1. Enhanced Forward ATP 39

3.8. Oracle Inventory Optimization 40 3.8.1. Release 12.1.1 40

3.8.1.1. Support for Intermittent Demands 40 3.8.2. Release 12.1.2 40 3.8.3. Release 12.1.3 40

3.8.3.1. Enhanced Budget Constraints 40

3.9. Oracle Production Scheduling 41 3.9.1. Release 12.1.1 41

3.9.1.1. Units of Measure on Items 41 3.9.1.2. Enhanced Alerts 41 3.9.1.3. Work Order Centric KPI Comparisons 42 3.9.1.4. Access Operation and Routings from Operation Instances 43 3.9.1.5. Auto-create Work Orders Directly from Demands 43 3.9.1.6. Find Functionality for Model Objects 44 3.9.1.7. Visibility to Demand Fulfilled via Starting Inventory 45 3.9.1.8. Automatic Reconciliation of Schedule Backlog 45 3.9.1.9. Batchable Resources 46 3.9.1.10. Consistent Resource Assignment within a Portion of a Routing 47 3.9.1.11. Resource-specific Cycle Times for Campaign Run Optimization 49 3.9.1.12. Minimize Work Order Schedule Infeasibilities 50 3.9.1.13. Disable Units of Effort for Setup and Cleanup Operations 51 3.9.1.14. Resource “All of” Sets 52 3.9.1.15. Hard Links Between Work Orders 55 3.9.1.16. Dynamic Throughput Rates on Resources 57 3.9.1.17. PS Data Connector Port to Sun, HP and AIX 59 3.9.1.18. Export Selected Model Data During Schedule Publish 59 3.9.1.19. PS XML Model – Unique Extension 60 3.9.1.20. Enhanced Auto-generated Routings 60 3.9.1.21. Selective Work Order Release to Production 61

3.9.2. Release 12.1.2 62

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document v

3.9.2.1. Resource Business Objectives 62 3.9.2.2. Production Scheduling as a Web Service Call 63 3.9.2.3. Undo Functionality for Manual Scheduling 63 3.9.2.4. Attribute Based Sequence Dependent Setups 65 3.9.2.5. Visualization of Campaign Run Optimization Cycle Boundaries 66 3.9.2.6. New Alert Type and Drilldowns 67 3.9.2.7. Drilldowns from the Work Order Editor to the Gantt Charts 68 3.9.2.8. Mass Change on Items and Resources 69

3.9.3. Release 12.1.3 70 3.9.3.1. Maintenance Work Order Scheduling 70 3.9.3.2. Disable Multiple Release from the Same Plan for the Same Order 74 3.9.3.3. User Defined Ideal Sequence 76 3.9.3.4. Supply Tolerancing 78 3.9.3.5. Control Application of Purchase Item Order Multiples Beyond Lead Time 79 3.9.3.6. Improved Operation Status Logic in OPM integration 81 3.9.3.7. Advanced Work Order Filtering 81

3.10. Oracle Rapid Planning – New Product 83 3.10.1. Product Overview 83 3.10.2. Release 12.1.3 84

3.10.2.1. Fast Simulation 84 3.10.2.2. Flexible User Interface 84 3.10.2.3. Simulation Sets 84 3.10.2.4. Mass Edits 85 3.10.2.5. Plan Comparisons 85 3.10.2.6. Aggregate, Editable Material Horizontal View 85 3.10.2.7. All-in-one Supply/Demand View 85 3.10.2.8. Integration with Advanced Planning Command Center 86 3.10.2.9. Unconstrained Planning 86 3.10.2.10. Constrained Planning 86 3.10.2.11. Demand Forecasts 87 3.10.2.12. Respect Demand Priority Rules 87 3.10.2.13. Demand and Supply Pegging 87 3.10.2.14. Supply Chain Sourcing 87 3.10.2.15. Supplier Capacity 88 3.10.2.16. Bills of Material and BOM Effectivity 88 3.10.2.17. By-products and Co-products 88 3.10.2.18. Routing Operation and Resource Scheduling 88 3.10.2.19. End Item Substitution 89 3.10.2.20. Lead Times and Planning Time Fence 89 3.10.2.21. Order Modifiers 89 3.10.2.22. Safety Stock Lead Time 89 3.10.2.23. Shipping, Receiving and Carrier Calendars 90 3.10.2.24. Planner Action: Firm Existing Supplies 90 3.10.2.25. Planner Action: Firm Planned Supplies 90 3.10.2.26. Release New Planned Orders and Reschedule Recommendations 90 3.10.2.27. Exceptions 91 3.10.2.28. Embedded Analytics 92 3.10.2.29. Late Demand Diagnosis 92 3.10.2.30. Global Forecasting 93 3.10.2.31. Configure to Order 93 3.10.2.32. Default Order Sizing 94 3.10.2.33. Inventory Reservations 94 3.10.2.34. Clear to Build 95 3.10.2.35. Rapid Planning – Sales and Operations Planning Integration 95 3.10.2.36. Rapid Planning – Global Order Promising Integration 95 3.10.2.37. Order Comparison 96 3.10.2.38. Multi-Planner Collaboration 96 3.10.2.39. Functional and Data Security 96

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document vi

3.11. Oracle Service Parts Planning – New Product 97 3.11.1. Product Overview 97 3.11.2. Release 12.1.1 97

3.11.2.1. Integrated Demand and Supply Planning 97 3.11.2.2. Service Parts Planning Workbench 97 3.11.2.3. Integration to Spares Management for External Repairs 98 3.11.2.4. Integration to Depot Repair for Internal Repairs 98 3.11.2.5. Support for Part Condition 98 3.11.2.6. Criticality Matrix 98 3.11.2.7. Support for Supersessions 98 3.11.2.8. Returns Forecasts 98 3.11.2.9. Minimize New Buys 99 3.11.2.10. Life Time Buys 99 3.11.2.11. Planner Work Lists 99 3.11.2.12. Integration with Collaborative Planning 99 3.11.2.13. Supersession Chain-Specific Replanning 99 3.11.2.14. Execution Net Change Planning 99

3.11.3. Release 12.1.2 100 3.11.3.1. Multi-process Inline Forecasting 100 3.11.3.2. Intermittent Demand Flag 100 3.11.3.3. Planner Worklist Enhancement 100

3.11.4. Release 12.1.3 101 3.11.4.1. Re-order Point-based Parts Planning 101 3.11.4.2. Import into a Simulation Set 101 3.11.4.3. Integration with Advanced Supply Chain Planning 102 3.11.4.4. Integration with APCC - Service Parts Planner Dashboard 102

3.12. Oracle Strategic Network Optimization 103 3.12.1. Release 12.1.1 103

3.12.1.1. Supply Chain Risk Management 103 3.12.1.2. Alerts 104 3.12.1.3. Key Performance Indicators 106 3.12.1.4. Usability Enhancements 108

3.12.2. Release 12.1.2 110 3.12.2.1. Aggregate Assignment Set and Lane Definition 110

3.12.3. Release 12.1.3 111

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Purpose of Document 1

1. Disclaimer This Release Content Document (RCD) describes product features that are proposed for the specified release of the Oracle E-Business Suite. This document describes new or changed functionality only. Existing functionality from prior releases is not described. It is intended solely to help you assess the business benefits of upgrading to the specified release of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

This document in any form, software or printed matter, contains proprietary information that is the exclusive property of Oracle. Your access to and use of this confidential material is subject to the terms and conditions of your Oracle Software License and Service Agreement, which has been executed and with which you agree to comply. This document and information contained herein may not be disclosed, copied, reproduced or distributed to anyone outside Oracle without prior written consent of Oracle. This document is not part of your license agreement nor can it be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates.

This document is for informational purposes only and is intended solely to assist you in planning for the implementation and upgrade of the product features described. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described in this document remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Due to the nature of the product architecture, it may not be possible to safely include all features described in this document without risking significant destabilization of the code.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Purpose of Document 2

2. Introduction

2.1. Purpose of Document

This Release Content Document (RCD) communicates information about new or changed functionality introduced in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 and subsequent 12.1.x Release Update Packs and off-cycle patches.

For your convenience, features are organized by product, and then by the release in which they first became available. Release 12.1.1 was the first generally-available release of Release 12.1. Features released in an off-cycle patch on Release 12.1.1, but before Release 12.1.2, are designated as Release 12.1.1+. Features released in RUP2 of Release 12.1 are designated as Release 12.1.2, and so on.

Existing functionality in Release 12.0, Release 12.0.x Release Update Packs (RUPs), or prior releases is not described in this document. For a complete overview of all functionality included in prior releases, this document should be read in conjunction with the Release 12 and Release 12.0.x RUP RCDs. These RCDs can be found in My Oracle Support Document 404152.1 Release Content Documents for E-Business Suite Release 12 and 12.0.x Release Update Packs.

https://support.oracle.com/CSP/ui/flash.html#tab=KBHome(page=KBHome&id=()),(page=KBNavigator&id=(bmDocID=404152.1&from=BOOKMARK&bmDocDsrc=KB&viewingMode=1143))�

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Collections 3

3. New and Changed Features in Value Chain Planning

3.1. Collections

3.1.1. Release 12.1.1

3.1.1.1. Backward Compatibility to 11i10

Oracle Advanced Planning Release 12.1.1 supports, through a Collections backward compatibility patch, the configuration where the source is E-Business Suite 11i10, and the destination (planning server) is Release 12.1.1. This backward compatibility applies to Advanced Supply Chain Planning, Distribution Planning (see exclusion below), Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning, Demand Management, Demand Planning, Inventory Optimization, Global Order Promising, Collaborative Planning, Advanced Planning Command Center, and Service Parts Planning.

Specific capabilities not supported in this configuration are:

• Advanced Supply Chain Planning − Oracle Transportation Management Integration

• Distribution Planning − release of cancel requisition recommendations • Service Parts Planning − integration to Spares Management • Service Parts Planning − integration to Depot Repair

3.2. Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center – New Product

3.2.1. Product Overview

Most supply chain planning processes, considered in their entirety, consist of multiple decision-making sub-processes often performed by different groups that are chained together. For example, a typical sales and operations planning cycle consists of forecasting performed by different lines of business such as sales, marketing, finance and manufacturing and distribution, a consensus demand review, inventory planning and review, supply planning and review, and executive review. These sub-processes may be supported by different underlying supply chain planning applications (Demand Management, Inventory Optimization, Strategic Network Optimization, Service Parts Planning and Advanced Supply Chain Planning.) The overall planning processes are difficult to orchestrate because the planning data required are buried in multiple underlying supply chain planning applications and because the human stakeholders come from multiple organizations.

Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center is a new product that pulls together planning outputs from multiple E-Business Suite supply chain planning applications and makes them available for reporting and analysis within a unified user interface based on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). The planning outputs are viewable via seeded role-based dashboards, and are also accessible to custom OBIEE reports and dashboards constructed by the user. Seeded dashboards support the Sales and Operations Planning and Supply Chain Plan Analysis business processes.

Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center offers an extensive list of web services that decompose Oracle Advanced Planning capabilities into atomic functional pieces (for

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center – New Product 4

example, run collections, generate a statistical forecast, run a supply chain plan, archive a plan.) These web services are leveraged by seeded Oracle Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes that can be used out of the box to automate Sales and Operations Planning and Forecast, Inventory and Supply Planning business flows. Users can also create an infinite variety of custom BPEL processes to automate and orchestrate their specific in-house planning flows (for example, hub and spoke planning).

Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center provides extensive plan and scenario comparison capabilities. It also allows you to assign manual activities required for the evaluation and execution of alternative business scenarios and monitor and orchestrate the completion of those activities.

Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center provides:

• a robust reporting and analysis framework for supply chain planning;

• the ability to automate, orchestrate, monitor and review the result of complex, inter-organizational and inter-disciplinary planning processes that span multiple supply chain planning applications (including external applications).

3.2.2. Release 12.1.1

3.2.2.1. Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard

The Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard included with Advanced Planning Command Center provides all participants in the Sales and Operations Planning process with interactive access to summary and detailed data required when executing the demand review, supply review and executive review phases of an S&OP cycle.

The Demand Review page answers questions such as:

• How have my sales, marketing, manufacturing/distribution, financial, and consensus forecasts changed over time?

• Is our backlog increasing? • How are we tracking to forecast?

The Supply Review page answers questions such as:

• Are we supply constrained? • Where are our resource constraints? • Are we producing to plan?

The Executive Review page answers questions such as:

• Are we on plan financially? • For which product categories are we revenue targets?

Dashboard level reports provide easy comparison of S&OP scenarios.

Reports in the Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard drill directly into underlying Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning worksheets, Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) plans and Strategic Network Optimization (SNO) plans for seamless extended analysis.

The following reports are available at the page level in the Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard:


Executive Review

• Executive Summary • Consolidated Analysis • Profit and Loss • Constrained Forecast Comparison • Cumulative Budget Tracking • Key Performance Indicators • Forecast Accuracy • Customer Service • Inventory and Production KPI • Top Difference - Operating Plan and Budget by Category • Profitability KPI • Cost Breakdown KPI

Demand Review

• Forecast Comparison • Forecast Accuracy • Projected Backlog • Top Forecast Attainment by Category • Forecast – Scenario Comparison • Top Abs Diff – Consensus Forecast and Budget by Category • Consensus Forecast Difference by Customer • Consensus Forecast Difference by Customer

Supply Review

• Consolidated Analysis • Demand Fill • Production to Plan by Organization • Production Plan • Top Resource Utilization • Top Supplier Capacity Utilization • Consolidated Analysis – Scenario Comparison • Bottom Demand Fill % by Customer • Supply Change by Category • Production Plan Comparison by Organization

3.2.2.2. Supply Chain Analyst Dashboard

The Supply Chain Analyst (SCA) Dashboard included with Advanced Planning Command Center provides easy access to summary and trend data for Advanced Supply Chain Planning and Strategic Network Optimization plans. It enables easy comparisons between plans.

The SCA Dashboard has the following pages and reports:

Plan Health

• shipment and production trends • demand and supply summary • resource summary • exceptions summary

Demand and Supply


• demand and supply summary • demand change by customer • supply change by category • demand and supply trends • demand by customer • supply by category

Resources

• resource summary • most utilized resources • least utilized resources • resources with most change in utilization • resource utilization trend

Exceptions

• demand exceptions summary • inventory exceptions summary • alternate exceptions summary • reschedule exceptions summary • resource exceptions summary • exceptions summary by category • exceptions summary by organization

Historical Performance

• key supply chain performance metrics (shipments to plan, production to plan, resource utilization, inventory value, days of cover)

• supply chain metrics trend

Scenario Analysis

• This page is similar to the Plan Health page. It allows you to compare demand and supply summary information, resource information, and exceptions across scenarios instead of across plans. (A scenario is a grouping of plans whose results should be added together and viewed as a whole.)

3.2.2.3. Analytical Framework

APCC provides a central Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)-based repository that automatically pulls plan data from a wide cross-section of Advanced Planning applications (Demand Management, Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning, Advanced Supply Chain Planning, Inventory Optimization and Strategic Network Optimization), as well as execution data (orders, shipments, inventory, WIP completions, etc.) from Oracle E-Business Suite. APCC contains more than 200 measures (both stored measures that are read into APCC and measures such as costed inventory that are derived), rationalized against a consistent set of dimensions. More than 20 dimensions are seeded.

The APCC analytical framework repository allows completely user-configurable reporting against Advanced Planning data, serves as the foundation for the seeded Sales and Operations Planning and Supply Chain Analyst Dashboards, and allows you to view data from multiple underlying Advanced Planning applications simultaneously in a unified interface.


3.2.2.4. Scenario Management

You can group multiple plans of different types together into a scenario, and then use that scenario to group and filter data in APCC dashboards and reports. Typical scenarios might be: a Demantra Demand Management consensus forecast, an Inventory Optimization plan, and an Advanced Supply Chain Planning plan that together evaluate a sales and operations planning scenario; or one "hub" and a number of "spoke" ASCP plans whose outputs need to be fused together to provide visibility to planning results for the entire supply chain.

Scenario Sets are groupings of related scenarios (for example, alternate supply/demand scenarios being evaluated within a particular sales and operations planning cycle). You can also use scenario sets to group and filter data in APCC dashboards and reports.

3.2.2.5. Supply Chain Planning Web Services

Many key Advanced Planning functions have now been made accessible via web services. These web services are callable from user-defined Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) flows, and therefore permit limitless automation of supply chain planning business flows.

The specific web services that have been enabled are:

• Check concurrent program status • Launch ASCP and Demantra batch collections • Global Order Promising • Launch plan management batch processes such as copy/purge plans • Launch Strategic Network Optimization batch processes • Manage planning process scenarios • Launch Service Parts Planning batch processes • Launch Inventory Optimization batch processes • Launch Distribution Planning batch processes • Launch Advanced Supply Chain Planning batch processes • Upload external data into APS (forecasts, safety stock, planned supply) • Launch Demantra process (launch Demantra workflow, assign alternative name

to Demantra scenario in planning server)

3.2.2.6. Seeded BPEL Processes

Two seeded BPEL processes take leverage the supply chain planning web services offered by APCC to automate and orchestrate key supply chain planning flows.

The Forecast, Inventory, and Supply Planning BPEL process automates a sequence of running collections, generating a forecast in Demantra Demand Management (DM), running an Inventory Optimization (IO) plan utilizing the DM output as input, running an Advanced Supply Chain Planning plan using the DM and IO plan outputs as input.

The Sales and Operations Planning BPEL process runs collections, creates financial forecast review, sales forecast review, marketing forecast review, and demand forecast review activities and assigns them to key stakeholders, uploads the consensus forecast from Demantra Real-Time Sales & Operations Planning (RT S&OP) to the planning server, runs a Strategic Network Optimization (SNO) plan with the RT S&OP consensus forecast as input, pulls the SNO constrained forecast/production plan output back into RT S&OP, then creates consensus demand review and executive review activities and assigns them to the appropriate stakeholders.


3.2.2.7. Process Automation

You can create planning processes and attach to them seeded or custom BPEL processes. Planning processes allow you to launch or halt associated BPEL processes, to enable completely flexible planning automation. The Planning Process user interface allows you to specify input parameters such as plan names to the underlying BPEL processes, see the key steps of the underlying BPEL process, assign process steps to owners, and monitor the progress of the BPEL process as it runs.

3.2.2.8. Activity Management

Process automation steps can be assigned to individuals using the Planning Process user interface. Such assignments become system activities with owning individuals. You can also assign arbitrary manual activities to individuals, optionally tied to a scenario or scenario set. Activities support file attachments, to allow more complete descriptions of required steps or inclusion of supplemental information. Assigned activities can be updated with progress status by the assignees and can be flexibly queried within the APCC Activities screen for monitoring purposes. Planners working with APCC dashboards and reports benefit from an iBot that informs them of open activities assigned to them. They can drill from a display of activities in the APCC reporting layer directly into the APCC Activities screen for further detail. APCC thus provides a comprehensive way to stay on top of all the system and manual activities needed to complete complex supply chain planning processes and scenario evaluations.

3.2.3. Release 12.1.2

3.2.3.1. Compatibility with 11.5.10 Planning Server

Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center Release 12.1.2 supports, through a Collections backward compatibility patch, the configuration where the Planning Server (where all the other APS modules are on) is 11.5.10, the source Oracle eBusiness Suite is also on 11.5.10 and only the Advanced Planning Command Center is on 12.1.2.) The deployment configuration is as shown below.

APS

12.

1A

PS 1

2.1

APS

11.

5.10

APS

11.

5.10

Advanced Supply Chain Advanced Supply Chain Planning 11.5.10Planning 11.5.10

Oracle Demantra 7.1/7.2Oracle Demantra 7.1/7.2

APS Operational Data Store APS Operational Data Store 11.5.1011.5.10

Advanced Planning Advanced Planning Command Center 12.1Command Center 12.1

Multiple EBS (11.5.10) Multiple EBS (11.5.10) or Legacy instancesor Legacy instancesMultiple EBS (11.5.10) Multiple EBS (11.5.10)

or Legacy instancesor Legacy instances

APS Operational Data Store APS Operational Data Store 12.112.1

Out-of-box Integration. User Option at Plan launch to “push”

Collect into both instances

This deployment configuration will be subject to the following specific limitations.


1. No Contextual Drilldowns from the Dashboards into the planning applications. This will be available only in the configuration where the planning server is upgraded to 12.1.2 and APCC is deployed in the same instance.

2. Need to collect into both APCC and APS instances. However, collections into APCC is only required for dimension keys. So the collection frequency could be less for APCC.

3. No support for Strategic Network Optimization in APCC. 4. The New Planning Web Services and BPEL Processes in APCC instance (in

“Processes” tab in Advanced Planning Scenario Manager) cannot use Plans and Forecasts from APS 11.5.10 even if they are published to APCC. But users can still build scenarios from these plans and forecasts from 11.5.10.

3.2.3.2. Integration to Third Party Planning Systems

You can now deploy APCC against third party planning systems. The APCC OBIEE fact repository can be loaded either via a new flat file (.csv) upload user interface, or via a new Import Plan Summary concurrent program.

3.2.3.3. Ability to Run APCC Standalone

For 11.5.10 and R12.1.2 customers, APCC now provides a complete, out-of-box integration to a separate, standalone 12.1.2 APCC instance. The key assumptions/limitations here are:

1. All dimensions are collected (or loaded using legacy uploads) into the APCC instance.

2. The EBS source instance setups (including instance codes) are identical in the 11.5.10 and 12.1.2 instances.

3. The drill-downs into other applications (Advanced Supply Chain Planning / Inventory Optimization / Demand Management) will not work.

4. This will be made available only for Demand Management, Advanced Supply Chain Planning and Inventory Optimization.

3.2.3.4. Rich User Interface Enhancements

APCC incorporates new rich user interface capabilities of E-Business Suite 12.1.2. These include a redesigned applications home page with more efficient navigation, multi-level navigation menus with saved favorites, "look-ahead" lists of values that automatically complete partial user entries, and inline file attachments for process activities.

3.2.4. Release 12.1.3

3.2.4.1. Analysis of Inventory and Service Levels

The current Supply Chain Analyst (SCA) dashboard in APCC has been enhanced with new measures and related reports to support Inventory Analysis workflows. The following new reports are included in a new tab in the SCA dashboard.

o Inventory Performance Summary o Top N – Service Level Short Fall by Category o Top N - Inventory Value o Safety Stock – Postponement Analysis o Inventory Measures Trend o Inventory Measures Trend by Category-Organization

Some of the new measures introduced as part of this include the following:


o Safety Stock (Days) o Percent Safety Stock - Demand Variability o Percent Safety Stock - Supplier Lead Time Variability o Percent Safety Stock - Manufacturing Lead Time Variability o Percent Safety Stock - Transportation Lead Time Variability

3.2.4.2. Analysis of Excess and Obsolescence

The current Supply Chain Analyst (SCA) dashboard in APCC has been enhanced with new measures and related reports to support analysis of Excess and Obselete inventory. The following new reports are included in the SCA dashboard.

o Excess and Obsolescence Summary o Excess Details o Obsolescence Details o Excess Details across Plans o Obsolescence Details across Plans

Some of the new measures introduced as part of this include the following:

o Demand within Obsolescence horizon o Demand within Excess Horizon o Excess On-order in units and value in multiple currencies o Excess On-hand in units and value in multiple currencies o Obsolete On-order in units and value in multiple currencies o Obsolete On-hand in units and value in multiple currencies o Total Excess in units and value in multiple currencies o Total Obsolescence in units and value in multiple currencies

3.2.4.3. Enhanced Sales and Operations Planning Dashboard

The Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) dashboard is enhanced to include the following new measures:

o Shipment history - Lag by 52 week o Operating Plan o Financial Forecast

In addition, the existing reports have been updated with new usability enhancements and new navigations to more drill-down reports. Also, a new tab called Financial Review has been added with the following reports

o Financial Summary o Operating Plan and Financial Forecast Comparison o Top % Difference - Operating Plan and Budget by Category o Financial Trend Analysis o Profit & Loss Monthly o Margin Difference by Category o Year-over-Year Financials o Financial Forecast and Budget Comparison o Top % Difference - Budget and Annual Plan by Organization o Top Revenue o Cost by Organization o Bottom Margin o Profitability KPI o Cost Breakdown KPI


This new Financial Review page enables planners and executives to answer questions like:

o Are we on plan financially? o How are product categories performing financially? o What has changed financially since last fiscal quarter/month? o How/Where/Why has profitability changed? o Is there any need to revise financial forecast?

3.2.4.4. Supply Chain Risk Management Dashboard

The Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) dashboard is a new dashboard and enables users to review and compare key metrics in a single interface, providing true Enterprise Planning capabilities to the SCRM discipline.

It enables executives and planners to answer questions like:

o What is the impact to my margins if there is a sudden drop in demand? o When do I return to profitability? o What is the cost difference between sourcing strategies in the event of the

demand drop? o What impact does increased lead times have on my inventory strategy? o What is the impact of off-shoring to my Total Delivered Cost? o What is the impact of off-shoring to my Margins?

The following new measures are introduced as part of this feature:

o Facility Startup/Shutdown Costs o Fixed Costs o Count of Sources o Carrying Cost without Postponement o Safety Stock without Postponement o Inventory Budget o Product Miles

The dashboard contains four different tabs - Executive Review, Inventory Analysis, Supply Chain Sourcing and Glossary.

3.2.4.5. Revenue Gap Analysis

This feature enables Supply Chain Analysts and Sales and Operations Planners to do additional reporting and analysis to close gaps between the current shipment rate and the revenue targets established as part of the sales and operations plan. This is most critical as the end of a period or quarter approaches and gaps remain.

The Supply Chain Analyst (SCA) dashboard has been enhanced to add the following reports in the Scenario analysis tab:

o Backlog Analysis – Units & Value o Bookings Performance – Units & Value o Current Shipment Plan o Demand and Supply Summary o Demand Utilization – Units & Value o Demand Utilization Split – Baseline Plan o Left to Book - By Quarter o Sales Order Analysis – Units & Value o Shipment Performance – Units & Value o Supply Utilization – Units & Value


The Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) dashboard has also been enhanced to add / modify the following reports:

o Current Shipment Plan o Supply Summary

3.2.4.6. Collaboration Workspaces for Unstructured Collaboration

This feature lets users to quickly band into ad-hoc, virtual groups for specific planning tasks and allows those groups to share structured and unstructured content. Each group has access to a single, flexible portal-like user interface that brings together components of various planning applications and the a variety of collaboration tools.

These collaborative group spaces support customized Worklists, Group Calendars, Documents, Discussions, Tags, Issues and Notes. In addition, the group space home page has navigation links to applications such as Rapid Planning and Sales and Operations Planning, and to APCC dashboards.

Each group space is linked to a Scenario created in Advanced Planning Command Center and users can choose to auto-create a group space when a scenario is created.

3.2.4.7. Enhanced Exceptions Analysis

The Supply Chain Analyst Dashboard has been enhanced to include additional measures and reports in support of improved exception analysis. Two new reports have been added as part of this feature:

o Item Exceptions Summary o Resource Exceptions Summary

In addition to the above, the following reports have been enhanced with additional page/report filters:

o Demand Exceptions Summary o Inventory Exceptions Summary o Alternate Exceptions Summary o Resource Exceptions Summary o Reschedules Exceptions Summary o Exception Summary by Category o Exception Summary by Organization

3.2.4.8. Integration with Rapid Planning

Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center now offers pre-built integration with Rapid Planning. Rapid Planning plans can be archived and published to Advanced Planning Command Center. These archived versions can then be viewed in all related reports and dashboards.

The Advanced Planning Command Center’s Supply Chain Analyst dashboard supports drill-down directly into the Rapid Planning application.

All Rapid Planning simulation plans can be used in the Process Automation functionality to build process flows in Advanced Planning Command Center.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning 13

3.2.4.9. Plan Versus Collected Data Comparison

Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center now offers a view of key supply and demand measures based on the latest transaction data collected into the Operational Data Store. These measures are available in the Supply Chain Analyst Dashboard under the plan name of "Collections". Users can compare them with Plans to get insights into the variances between what is in a Plan (including changes introduced due to plan recommendations and user changes) and the latest real-time transactional data. An example of this type of analysis may include a comparison of expected receipts of material in the next few weeks based on the Plan versus what is currently in the execution system (as brought over to Value Chain Planning via Collections).

3.3. Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning

3.3.1. Release 12.1.1

3.3.1.1. Oracle Transportation Management Integration

Most planning systems have no visibility to delays in transportation and their impact to manufacturing utilization or customer service. With this release ASCP will:

• Leverage Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) Supply Chain Event Management to obtain real-time, projected material arrival dates

• Provide a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) process and associated web services to consume events and generate planning exceptions to provide planners real time visibility to transportation delays

• Use the updated dates in ASCP interactive planning calculations to calculate the impact of transportation delays on downstream orders and take corrective action

3.3.1.2. Optimization Enhancements

Oracle ASCP enables planners to efficiently manage many products and supply chain locations by intelligently selecting alternate sources, manufacturing processes, bills of material, and substitute items. With this release, ASCP's automated decision-making capabilities have been enhanced in the following ways.

3.3.1.2.1. Day-Level Planning

A new "day-level" planning mode allows ASCP to automate the selection of alternates while generating planning results at the day level of granularity. This planning mode skips the final detailed scheduling solution phase that is now undertaken with any constrained or optimized plan run. For customers for whom day-level planning results are sufficiently detailed, this is a way to run plans in a shorter amount of time than was previously possible (due to the fact that the final detailed scheduling phase is skipped).

3.3.1.2.2. More Accurate Offloading to Alternates

It is often desired to offload to alternate sources or processes only once a primary source or process runs out of capacity. ASCP now does a more accurate job of


offloading: it offloads primary sources and processes more fully before offloading to alternates, and planning results show fewer instances of primary source/process overloading before offloading to alternates.

3.3.1.3. Contiguous Processing

In the process industries, many products need to be processed contiguously from raw materials to finished goods, because intermediate products may be unstable or because intermediate products are transported from process to process without any provision for storage in between.

With this release, ASCP respects Oracle Process Manufacturing standard and max delays between routings. This allows you to cap the maximum time duration between upstream and downstream make supplies and enforce contiguous processing. You can also enforce a minimum (standard) delay between make supplies in order to accurately reflect processing constraints such as cool-down periods.

3.3.1.4. Minimum Remaining Shelf Life

Products such as groceries and pharmaceuticals have limited shelf lives. Customers of such products typically impose rules that dictate that when such products arrive at the customer site, they must have a certain minimum duration of remaining shelf life, so that there will be enough time for the end consumer to buy and use the products. ASCP now supports minimum remaining shelf life (MRSL) constraints specified at the item-organization, item-customer site and sales order levels. Item-organization and item-customer site-level MRSLs are specified via item attribute simulation sets. Sales order-level MRSLs can only be entered via customization that populates a new column in the MSC_SALES_ORDERS table on the planning server.

3.3.1.5. Distribution Planning Scalability Enhancements

Distribution enterprises often need to manage large numbers of locations and items: the number of locations may be in the thousands; the number of items at each location may be in the tens of thousands or more. Planning in such an environment requires a focus on scalability.

With this release, Distribution Planning incorporates the following scalability enhancements. First, the phase of planning that calculates the independent and dependent demands at each distribution location and allocates scarce supply to those demands has been made multi-process, in order to take advantage of the parallelization capabilities of multi-processor hardware configurations. Such a configuration can either be a single planning server with multiple processors, or multiple servers logically linked together via Real Application Clusters. The partitioning of the distribution planning problem into pieces that can be solved in parallel is done automatically.

In conjunction with the above change, the load consolidation phase of Distribution Planning has been decoupled from the demand push-down and supply allocation phase mentioned above and is now also done concurrently in a multi-process fashion. Functionally, this may reduce how well Distribution Planning is able to consolidate loads relative to its base behavior in Release 12, because the consolidation calculations in downstream supply chain layers now no longer factor in the consolidation outputs from upstream layers. This is a trade-off that the user optionally makes for the sake of better performance.


The above behavior is optional, and is enabled via profile options.

3.3.1.6. End Item Substitution Enhancements

Use-up of on hand inventory is critical to controlling storage and obsolescence costs at many companies. One way in which ASCP helps in this regards is to recommend the use of available substitute item supplies when the demanded item is not on hand. Prior to this release, such end-item substitution recommendations made by ASCP could not be automatically released back and implemented in Order Management. With this release, the ASCP sales order release process has been enhanced to support the passing back of ASCP substitute item recommendations back to the associated sales orders in Order Management.

ASCP also supports an option to recognize explicitly modeled item substitution relationships only and thus turn off the inference of chained substitutions. If Item B is a substitute for Item A, and Item C is a substitute for Item B, it is now possible to configure ASCP to not infer that Item C is a substitute for Item A.

When searching for end-item substitute supplies, ASCP can optionally search for them in ascending order of substitution relationship date effectivity. This provides a mechanism for dictating the item order of ASCP's search for end-item substitutes.

This capability is not supported for R12.0.x source instances. It is supported for R12.1.1 and 11i10 source instances.

3.3.1.7. Production Schedules as Inputs

You can now publish planned orders directly from Production Scheduling into an ASCP plan. Planned orders scheduled in PS come into ASCP as firm planned orders. This allows ASCP plans to remain consistent with short-term scheduling decisions made in PS.

3.3.1.8. Safety Lead Time

In lieu of generating supplies to meet target safety stock quantities, ASCP now offers the option of hedging against uncertain demand by generating supplies to meet demands ahead of time. The amount of time that demands are met ahead of time is the "safety lead time", and is specified via the Safety Stock Percent item attribute (100% per one day of safety lead time). This feature is turned on via the MSO: Use Safety Lead Time profile option.

3.3.1.9. Customization of Horizontal Plan

ASCP supports the ability to customize the row labels and numbers displayed in the horizontal plan. One typical application of this capability is to display demands and supplies in alternate units of measure.

A new custom row in the horizontal plan allows a user to display a custom order type (for example, Projected Available Balance Dollar Value) and label it appropriately. The custom row can be selectively displayed, by user or by preference. The logic to calculate custom order type data values must be provided by the user via a custom PL/SQL program unit that is pointed to by the profile option MSC: Horizontal Plan Extension Program. The same mechanism can be used to customize data values in standard rows of the horizontal plan.


3.3.1.10. Supply Tolerancing Enhancements

In the process industries, process variability often creates supply output quantities that vary about a nominal amount. For example, a "10,000 pound" coil of aluminum sheet may actually come out to be 9,950 pounds or 10,035 pounds. The planning requirements are to be able to tolerate minor discrepancies between demand and supply so as to prevent unnecessary production and impractical supply splits. For example, a demand for 10,000 pounds should be considered to be satisfied completely by a 9,950 pound coil. When the same demand is satisfied with a 10,035 pound coil, planning should not recommend that the extra 35 pounds be split off to be used to satisfy other demands.

ASCP supports the concept of supply tolerancing through Shortage Tolerance and Excess Tolerance Percent pegging controls that dictate when demands and supplies are considered to be fully pegged. In the example with the 9,950 pound coil above, ASCP will still generate a recommendation for an extra 10,000 pound coil to cover the supply deficit, but will peg that supply to excess so that it is moved to the end of the planning horizon. This prevents the planner from accidentally releasing unneeded work to the production floor.

Supply tolerancing support where Shortage and Excess Tolerance Percentages are input as global profile option values is existing capability. New with this release is the ability for the user to optionally specify Shortage and Excess Tolerance Percentages (via customization) at the item-organization level in the staging table MSC_ST_SYSTEM_ITEMS. If these values are populated, ASCP will look at these staging table values in lieu of the profile option values.

Also new is ASCP's ability to delay the satisfaction of 'small' demands until sufficient outstanding demand has accumulated to warrant the production of a standard-sized batch. 'Small' is defined to be a percentage of the Fixed Lot Multiple order modifier. This percentage can be entered (via customization) in the planner server table MSC_SYSTEM_ITEMS.

3.3.1.11. Buy Order Processing Lead Time Backward Compatibility

In 11i9 the processing lead time for buy planned orders was offset based on the org manufacturing calendar. Starting in 11i10, the processing lead time for buy planned orders was offset based on the Supplier Capacity Calendar, if it was assigned on the Approved Supplier List. Otherwise the processing lead time was offset based on a 24x7 calendar. In order to preserve behavior compatibility with 11i9 for customers who may have set their buy item processing lead times assuming org manufacturing calendar offsetting and are upgrading from 11i9 to R12.1.1, a new profile option MSC: Buy Order Processing Lead Time Calendar allows you to either revert back to the 11i9 behavior (when it is set to 'Org Manufacturing Calendar') or use the 11i10 behavior (when it is set to 'Supplier Capacity Calendar').

3.3.2. Release 12.1.2

3.3.2.1. Release Recommendations for Internal Requisitions

You can now release reschedule in, reschedule out, and cancellation recommendations for internal requisitions. Previously, Oracle Purchasing did not support changes to an internal requisition after the corresponding internal sales order had been created in Oracle Order Management. This restriction has now been removed. ASCP's recommendations for internal orders can now be successfully released from the planner


workbench. You can also release manual overrides of internal requisition date and quantity.

3.3.2.2. Turn Off Planned Order Creation

You can turn off planned order creation for an item via the new Item Mass Maintenance item attribute "New Planned Order Creation". The permissible values are: “Create New Planned Orders” (default) and “Do Not Create New Planned Orders”. Use cases for this capability are:

• A by-product defined in the BOM can be used as downstream component. The requirement is to ensure that while all available supplies of the by-product are consumed, no supplies for this item are purchased. In addition, Sales Orders can be taken for the by-product and shipped as supplies are available, but no new supplies should be manufactured to meet Sales Order demand.

• To enable phasing out of item components and their replacement with newer ingredients, it is required that there be no new order or build for the phased out item. The existing supply of the phased out item is to be used up.

• No new supplies for certain products are to be made, but available stock can be distributed and sold.

This features is only available in the Constrained (Without Scheduling) and Constrained (With Scheduling) planning modes. It is also available in Distribution Planning. It is not available in the Unconstrained, Constrained (Classic), Constrained (Classic) With Decision Rules and Optimized (Classic) planning modes.

3.3.2.3. Consume Purchase Orders in First In, First Out Sequence

Standard ASCP behavior matches supplies to demands in a way that minimizes inventory. For example, if within a week there is a demand of 1 on Friday, and purchase order supplies of 1 each on Monday and Thursday, ASCP would match the Thursday purchase order to the Friday demand and recommend the cancellation of the Monday purchase order.

With this (optional) feature, ASCP would match the Monday purchase order to the Friday demand and recommend the cancellation of the Thursday purchase order. Use of existing purchase order supplies in this chronological fashion applies across substitute components: if the Monday and Thursday purchase orders in our example are in fact different items but substitute components, ASCP would still consume the Monday purchase order and cancel the Thursday purchase order.

This feature is useful for minimizing the impact of purchase order change recommendations on suppliers.

3.3.3. Release 12.1.3

3.3.3.1. Forecast Spreading Based on Shipping Calendar

Before this release ASCP supported forecast spreading based on only manufacturing calendar.


In this release a new profile option “MSC: Forecast Spreading Calendar” enables users to spread forecasts based on the shipping calendar in addition to the manufacturing calendar. The list of values for this profile option includes:

Organization Manufactur ing Calendar – This is the default value. The system will use the organization manufacturing calendar for spreading the forecast.

Organization Shipping Calendar – The system will use the organization shipping calendar for spreading the forecast.

Note – A forecast for a non-working day in the manufacturing calendar is moved to the previous working day.

Example: Consider an organization with a manufacturing calendar that has both Saturday and Sunday as non-working days. On the other hand the shipping calendar has only Sunday as the only non-working day of the week. Based on the shipping calendar, a forecast of 480 units for period 3 (March) is spread evenly to daily buckets from Monday to Saturday (total of 24 buckets). That results in the daily forecast quantity of 20 (480 / 24 = 20). Since Saturday is not a working day based on the manufacturing calendar, therefore ASCP moves and adds up the Saturdays’ forecasts to Fridays’ forecasts (20 + 20 = 40). The result is shown in the following table:

Monday Tuesday Wednesday

Thursday

Friday Saturday Sunday

Date 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Forecast 20 20 20 20 40 0

Date 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Forecast 20 20 20 20 40 0

Date 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Forecast 20 20 20 20 40 0

Date 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Forecast 20 20 20 20 40 0

3.3.3.1. Excluding Planned Orders from Supply Tolerancing

Before this release the Shortage Tolerance Percent and Excess Tolerance Percent were applied to all order types including planned orders.

With this release ASCP provides a profile option called “MSC: Apply shortage and excess tolerance percentages to planned orders”. The list of values for this profile option includes:

Yes – The shortage tolerance and excess percentages are applied to all supplies including planned orders. This is the default value.

No – The shortage tolerance and excess percentages are applied only to existing supplies (such as On Hand, WIP).


When this profile option is set to No, it allows ASCP to generate planned orders that satisfy 100% of demand, while matching existing supplies (which may have irregular quantities due to actual process yields) to demands using a supply tolerance.

Example – Consider an item with 2 demands:

Demand1= 10200 Demand2= 10200

Fixed Order Quantity = 2000

MSC: Demand Satisfied Percent Threshold for Pegging = 98

Shortage Tolerance Quantity = 10200 × (100 – 98) / 100 = 204

MSC: Minimum Supply/Demand Percent for Pegging = 0.0018

Excess Tolerance Quantity = 10200 × 0.0018 = 1836

If the profile option “MSC: Apply shortage and excess tolerance percentages to planned orders” is set to “No”, ASCP creates 6 planned orders of 2000 to satisfy Demand1 of 10200. In this case Demand1 is satisfied completely and the excess of 1800 (12000 – 10200) is used to satisfy Demand2 ignoring the excess tolerance percent even though 1800 < 1836.

On the other hand, if the profile option is set to “Yes”, then ASCP initially creates 6 planned orders to satisfy Demand1, but it uses (pegs) only 5 of those to satisfy this demand since (10200 – 10000) < 204. In this case Demand1 is satisfied with an allowed shortage of 200. The other planned order of 2000 is used for satisfying Demand2.

3.3.3.2. Maximize Use-Up of Substitute Components

With this release ASCP provides a new profile option called “MSO: Use up existing supply of primary components before substitute” that allows you to maximize usage of substitute components. The list of values for this profile option includes:

Yes – ASCP uses the existing supply of primary components before substitute components. This is the default value.

No – ASCP uses the existing supply of substitute components before primary components.

If this profile option is set to “No”, and there is no existing supply for substitute components, ASCP generates new planned orders for the primary components before substitute components.

In addition to the above profile option, you need to set the following 2 profile options to use this feature:

1 – MSO: Use Existing Supplies in Alternate BOM/Subs. Comp

This profile option allows you to control how the existing supplies in substitute components / alternate BOM paths are used by ASCP. You need to set the value of this profile option to 0 (consider both existing substitute component supplies and existing alternate BOM component supplies) or 1 (consider existing substitute component supplies but not existing alternate BOM component supplies) to use this enhancement.


Values 2 (consider neither existing substitute component supplies nor existing alternate BOM component supplies) and 3 (consider existing alternate BOM component supplies but not existing substitute component supplies) are not compatible with this feature.

2 – MSO: Postpone Use of Alternates to Latest Possible Time

This profile option enables ASCP to plan supplies with respect to the timing of alternates’ usage. You need to set the value of this profile option to “No” to use this feature.

ASCP behavior with respect to this feature is summarized as follows:

With the feature turned off (MSO: Use up existing supply of primary components before substitute = Yes):

1. Use on hand and scheduled receipts of primary components

2. Use on hand and scheduled receipts of substitute components

3. Generate new planned orders for primary components

4. Generate new planned orders for substitute components

With the feature turned on (MSO: Use up existing supply of primary components before substitute = No):

1. Use on hand and scheduled receipts of substitute components

2. Use on hand and scheduled receipts of primary components

3. Generate new planned orders for primary components

4. Generate new planned orders for substitute components

Note that the on hand of a substitute component will not be used if it is less than the Minimum Order Quantity, Fixed Order Quantity, or Fixed Lot Multiplier. The on hand of a substitute component may be partially used if it is greater than the order modifiers but it is not a multiple of them.

This enhancement is only available with the Constrained (Without Scheduling) planning mode.

3.3.3.3. Distribution Planning Enhanced Order Modifier Support

Distribution planning now supports two more order modifiers: maximum order quantity and minimum order quantity. This is in addition to the currently supported fixed lot multiplier and round order modifiers. Users can specify maximum and minimum order quantity as an item attribute. Users can also choose to specify each newly supported order modifier on the supply allocation rule. Order modifiers specified on a supply allocation rule are applied to transfers between organizations.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Collaborative Planning 21

3.4. Oracle Collaborative Planning

3.4.1. Release 12.1.1

3.4.1.1. Export Exception Details

This enhancement enables the export of the Collaborative Planning Exceptions Detail screen to a .csv file that can be opened in spreadsheet and other external applications. Data can be exported for one user selected exception class at a time, or for all exception classes together. The structure of the exported data is similar to what is seen on the Exception Details screen.

3.4.1.2. Detailed Supply Commit Based on ASCP Pegging

ASCP will publish supply commits to Collaborative Planning based on how end item supplies are pegged to the end item demands in the ASCP plan. Earlier, ASCP published only a single supply commit record to Collaborative Planning on the date when the demand was completely satisfied. With the new behavior, if a demand is satisfied by pegging against on hand and also a planned production batch, two supply commit records will be published, corresponding to the individual pegging quantities and dates. This new behavior is enabled by the profile option MSC: Publish Supply Commit Based on Pegging Information.

3.4.1.3. Search Exceptions by Buyer and Planner

The search criteria in the exceptions detail screen have been enhanced to include "Buyer Code" and "Planner Code".

3.4.2. Release 12.1.2

3.4.2.1. Rich User Interface Enhancements

Oracle Collaborative Planning incorporates new rich user interface capabilities of E-Business Suite 12.1.2. These include a redesigned applications home page with more efficient navigation, multi-level navigation menus with saved favorites, and "look-ahead" lists of values that automatically complete partial user entries.

3.4.3. Release 12.1.3

There are no new enhancements in Oracle Collaborative Planning in Release 12.1.3.

3.5. Oracle Demand Planning

3.5.1. Release 12.1.1

3.5.1.1. Clear Data in Worksheets

This feature allows the user to clear data from existing cells in a worksheet.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Demand Planning 22

The Fill Data dialog in the worksheet now allows a null entry. The data is replaced with a null/NA. A recalculate is required to reflect the change across all levels of the hierarchy.

3.5.1.2. Default Even Allocation Over Time

This feature gives the user the ability to allocate evenly down the time dimension and use "first" allocation for other dimensions when an allocation basis is not available.

The profile MSD: Use Classic Even Allocation can now have three values, one of which signifies that the fallback default allocation for the time dimension will be even. The three valid choices for the profile are:

• Yes, use even allocation • No, use first allocation • No, use first allocation for all dimensions except Time

3.5.1.3. Plan Security by Responsibility and Organization

This feature prevents users from one Business Unit from accessing demand plans set up for another Business Unit. The Demand Planning System Administrator can now associate Demand Plan Responsibilities with specific Organizations. Organization(s) are selected during plan definition. Users can then access only plans defined for the Organizations associated with their Responsibility.

By default a Responsibility is associated with all Organizations.

3.5.1.4. Sort by Product in Planning Percentages Worksheet

This feature adds a sort capability for Product to the Selector for the Planning Percentage Worksheet. The user now has the ability to sort the Product dimension in ascending or descending order to facilitate selection of models and options.

3.5.1.5. Data Selection Tools for Region Copy Selector

This feature makes all the Selector tools available to the user when creating a Region Copy measure to facilitate data selection.

3.5.1.6. Prevent Planners from Editing Measures in View Scope

This feature allows you to prevent planners from changing worksheet values in measures in their view scope. Planners can continue to change worksheet values in measures in their assignment scope. Whether this feature is enabled or not, only values in a demand planner's assignment scope are passed back to the shared workspace during internal collaboration.

3.5.2. Release 12.1.2

There are no new enhancements in Oracle Demand Planning in Release 12.1.2.

3.5.3. Release 12.1.3

There are no new enhancements in Oracle Demand Planning in Release 12.1.3.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Demand Signal Repository – New Product 23

3.6. Oracle Demand Signal Repository – New Product


The Oracle Demand Signal Repository (DSR) helps manufacturers collect detailed retailer and other demand data, analyze it to identify issues and opportunities, and respond via a SOA-enabled services library.

Typical retail data sources include daily point-of-sale, on-hand inventory, store orders and receipts, returns, store promotions and sales/order forecasts. The DSR transforms retailer data into manufacturer terms – including manufacturer item identification, manufacturer hierarchies and calendars. A high-performance data loading facility cleanses the data and allocates it to a uniform set of dimension levels.

The Demand Signal Repository data model is based upon the Oracle Data Warehouse for Retail (ODWR) data model, adapted to a manufacturer point of view. An extensive OBIEE metadata layer sits on top of the ODWR data model, and allows users to develop custom reports that combine the data in customer-specific ways.

DSR web services provide complementary applications such as Demantra Demand Management with cleansed retail point of sale, on-hand inventory and other data at daily store level, or aggregated to a higher level as needed.

3.6.2. Release 12.1.1

3.6.2.1. Customer Organization Hierarchy

DSR captures customer organizational information as well as customer organizational hierarchy to allow CG Manufacturer’s to view customer data based on the customer’s perspective of their organization.

The lowest level in the organization hierarchy is the Business Unit which is a single customer location. While business unit types are user-defined, the two most common types of business units are stores and customer distribution centers.

DSR captures several business unit attributes such as address, general contact, and VAT information, as well as store-specific attributes such as store manager, physical properties (store size, number of window displays, restrooms, etc.). Additionally, business units can be associated with a distribution channel and/or a market area to allow analysis by channel or a market area (such as the Los Angeles market).

Each business unit has a physical address. This enables the Business Unit to be analyzed by a geographic dimension, as well as the organization hierarchy.

The other levels of the organization hierarchy (listed from top to bottom) include: Retail Group, Chain, Area, Region, District, and finally Business Unit. DSR allows you to aggregate fact data to any level of the customer’s organization hierarchy.

The customer organization hierarchy supports the slowly changing dimension (SCD) type 2 feature. This feature keeps historical data (e.g., sales) associated with the hierarchical structure in effect at the time, to ensure proper analysis.


3.6.2.2. Multiple Calendar Support

In addition to the standard Gregorian calendar, DSR also provides additional calendars types including business, fiscal, advertising, and planning calendar type.

The consumer goods manufacturer can use all calendar types, whereas the only calendar type that supports customer-specific calendars is the business calendar. By having a separate business calendar for each customer, the account team or category manager can view data in terms of the customer’s week, month, etc.

3.6.2.3. Customer Item Hierarchy

DSR captures customer item information as well as customer item hierarchy to allow consumer goods manufacturers to view customer data based on the manner in which the customer organizes their product groupings.

The lowest level in the customer item hierarchy is the SKU. DSR captures several attributes at the SKU level including price, cost, size, color, style, variety, etc. Additionally, SKUs can be associated to a brand or group into item clusters to allow further analysis.

The other levels of the customer item hierarchy (listed from top to bottom) include: Company, Division, Group, Department, Category, Subcategory, Item and finally SKU. DSR allows you to aggregate fact data to any level of the customer’s item hierarchy.

The customer item hierarchy supports the slowly changing dimension (SCD) type 2 feature. This feature keeps historical data (e.g., sales) associated with the hierarchical structure in effect at the time, to ensure proper analysis.

3.6.2.4. Manufacturer Item Hierarchy

DSR captures the manufacturer’s item information as well as item hierarchy to allow consumer goods manufacturers to view data by the product categorization and descriptions used within their own company.

The lowest level in the manufacturer item hierarchy is the SKU. DSR captures several attributes at the SKU level which can differ from the retailer’s SKU attribute values.

The other levels of the manufacturer’s item hierarchy (listed from top to bottom) include: Company, Division, Group, Class, Subclass, Item and finally SKU. The manufacturer’s item hierarchy is seven levels deep, whereas the customer’s item hierarchy is eight levels deep (to accommodate the broad range of products carried by retailers).

Like the customer item hierarchy, the manufacturer’s item hierarchy also supports the slowly changing dimension (SCD) type 2 feature. This feature keeps historical data (e.g., sales) associated with the hierarchical structure in effect at the time, to ensure proper analysis.

3.6.2.5. Multiple Currency Support

Monetary values within DSR can be represented in one of two currencies. The first is the retailer’s corporate currency, whereas each retailer can have a different currency. The second is the reporting currency of the manufacturer.


DSR converts values from the retailer’s currency to the manufacturer’s reporting currency based upon a conversion table.

By default, reports will use the manufacturer reporting currency. If needed, the reports can be customized to replace the reporting currency with the retailer currency.

3.6.2.6. Alternate Units of Measure

In DSR the typical base unit of measure is a saleable unit or “Each” (EA). DSR supports alternate units of measure (kilos, liters, stats) to address manufacturing, shipping or marketing requirements. For example, a beverage company might select volume in liters as their alternative UOM. Each SKU has a ratio to convert the primary UOM quantity to the alternate UOM quantity.

3.6.2.7. Authorized Distribution

A system parameter, called discovery mode, controls whether stores must be authorized to carry an item.

When discovery mode is off, items must be pre-associated with a valid business unit (aka store) in order to successfully process sales and forecast data for that business unit/item combination.

When item discovery mode is on, the data loading process will create a new authorized item/store record the first time that it encounters a SKU at a business unit (store) where it has never previously been reported.

3.6.2.8. Sales Allocation

Fact data in Demand Signal Repository is always stored at the lowest level by SKU/Business Unit/Day. Data supplied at an aggregate level is allocated down to the day during the load process. For example, weekly, chain-level data must be allocated to a daily, business unit level (either store or DC).

Organization and time-level allocation profiles define the percentage of the aggregate value to be allocated to each the day or location. Allocation preserves any fractional quantity, in order for a data value to be the same when re-aggregated to the level at which it was originally received.

3.6.2.9. Sales Facts

The DSR sales & return process flow loads units sold, units returned and their related monetary value and cost. Data can be reported at the business unit level (e.g., store) or at a higher level in the organization for a given day or week. Sales reported at an aggregate level are allocated to the lowest level (by business unit / day).

3.6.2.10. Shipments

The shipments process flow loads shipped units and monetary amount for a given business unit/item/day. Shipments are reported against a specific store or distribution center, no allocation logic is supported for shipment data.


3.6.2.11. Orders

The orders process flow loads order quantity and monetary amount for a given business unit/item/day. Orders (like Shipments) are reported against a specific store or distribution center, again no allocation logic is supported for order data.

3.6.2.12. Inventory

The item inventory process flow loads on-hand, received, in-transit, backordered, and quality hold quantities, net costs, and retail amounts for a given business unit/item/location/day. Item Inventory (like Shipments and Orders) are reported against a specific store or distribution center, so no allocation logic is supported for order data.

3.6.2.13. Sales Forecasts

The sales forecast process flow loads forecasted sales units and their related monetary value. Like the sales and returns process flow, data can be reported at the business unit level (e.g., store) or at a higher level in the organization for a given day or week. Sales forecasted at an aggregate level are allocated to the lowest level (by business unit / day).

3.6.2.14. Promotion Plans

The promotions plan process flow loads information on what promotions are in effect at a store for an item during a given time period, as well as whether the promotion includes an associated price discount or not.

3.6.2.15. Category Sales Analysis Dashboard

The Category Management Dashboard displays key measures that are important to a Category Manager. This includes:

• Retailer Net Cost to Gross Margin is a quick reference into the profitability of each product category carried by the retailer.

• Category Coverage provides a breakdown of sales by retailer by product category.

• Product Mix provides a breakdown of sales by product category across retailers. • Product Contribution to Profit lists the top performing products based on

contribution to their respective product category. • Category Sales by Type displays the breakdown by promotional versus non-

promotional sales. • Sales Growth Percent Change to Previous Period displays the growth (or

decline) of this period’s sales to the prior period.

Some of the key characteristics of the dashboard include:

• Displaying multiple KPIs, or measures, in a single dashboard • Tracking performance relative to pre-defined thresholds • Drill-down capabilities to view supporting data • Ability to view by retailer or manufacturer hierarchy • Automatic delivery of the underlying reports via MS Office tools.

3.6.2.16. Product to Category Coverage Reports

The Product to Category Coverage reports shows the percentage of category, brand or item penetration (by unit sales and monetary sales) into specific channels of distribution (e.g. grocery retail, mass merchandiser, drug, wholesale /club, etc.).


Two separate reports are available: The “Product to Category Coverage by Quarter” and the “Product to Category Coverage by Period”.

The available filters include:

• Time (year, quarter month). • Channel (grocery retail, mass merchandiser, etc.) • Product Category or Item • Item Type (manufacturer item or retailer items)

3.6.2.17. Category Growth Analysis Reports

The Category Growth Analysis reports measure category’s growth by sales volume and monetary value, across time and to the brand and item levels.

Two reports are available: The “Category Growth Analysis by Volume” report and the “Category Growth Analysis by Sales” report


• Time (year, quarter, month). • Channel (grocery retail, mass merchandiser, etc.) • Product Category • Item Type (manufacturer item or retailer items) • Market Area

3.6.2.18. Category Sales by Type Reports

The Category Sales by Type report shows category sales units and monetary sales by promotion type. Promotion Sales are sales from the retail POS system that are priced and/or based on a promotion. Regular Sales are sales from the retail POS system that are priced at standard Non-Promotion periods or pricing.

Two reports are available: The “Category Sales Volume by Type: and the “Category Sales Value by Type” report.


• Time (year, quarter, month). • Channel (grocery retail, mass merchandiser, etc.) • Product Category • Item Type (manufacturer item or retailer items)

3.6.2.19. Average Price Analysis Report

The Average Price Analysis report compares unit sales and average retail sales price to the same period last year.


• Time (year, quarter, month). • Product Category • Item Type (manufacturer item or retailer items)

3.6.2.20. Top and Bottom Performers Reports

The top and bottom performers reports provide an immediate view of the top performers and bottom performers by profit or sales amount.


Four reports are available:

• Top Performers by Profit • Bottom Performers by Profit • Top Performers by Sales • Bottom Performers by Sales


• Top Performer (which is the number to display, the default if left blank is 10) • Time (year, quarter, month). • Product Category • Item Type (manufacturer item or retailer items) • Customer

3.6.2.21. Ad-Hoc Reporting

Demand Signal Repository leverages native OBIEE functionality to produce ad-hoc reports. This includes:

• Flexible creation of ad hoc/new reports by end users which can then be published to a wider audience

• Ability to view data in multiple formats, including pivot table, graph, chart, etc. • Ability to drill down to lowest level of detail, based on existing dimensions, like

retail or manufacture item or organization hierarchy • Seamless integration with MS Office tools to export to Excel, PowerPoint, etc. • And the ability to integrate geographic visualization. For example, to show sales

by store, zip code, etc. on a map.

3.6.2.22. Sales Scorecard

The sales scorecard is divided into four sections which the users can filter by customer and/or date. The four sections are:

• “Latest Results” for the selected company (aka customer). • “Latest Results” broken down by product category • “Overall Company” YTD results. • “Overall Company” YTD results broken down by product Category

The measures displayed in each of the four quadrants include Monetary Sales, Unit Sales, Category Sales, Category Share, Retailer Gross Margin, Gross Marting Percent, and Forecast Accuracy.

3.6.2.23. Supply Chain Scorecard

The Supply Chain scorecard shows results against goal comparisons for seven supply-chain oriented measures. Like the Sales Scorecard, it is divided into four panels, with the left panels showing the latest results and the right panels showing values summarized by year. Also like the Sales Scorecard, the top two sections show company performance; however, the bottom two sections show performance across all manufacturer products at the customer organization’s “region” level.

The measures for each of the four sections of the supply chain scorecard include Service Level, Order Cycle Time, and On-Time Delivery, Inventory Cover, On-hand Inventory, In-Stock %, and Percent returns


3.6.2.24. Operations Scorecard

The operations tab is divided into two panels. Operational measures are only available at supply chain level, not at a more granular level (such as category or region).

All seven measures (Perfect order %, Order change %, Invoice accuracy %, Payment days, Deduction amount, Item data synchronization % and Item data accuracy %) are external measures imported into DSR through the ETL process.

3.6.2.25. Demantra Demand Management Integration

Demand Signal Repository has a pre-built outbound integration of aggregated demand signals to Demantra. Data sent from DSR to Demantra includes:

• Retailer Point of Sale Sales and Forecast • Retailer On-Hand Inventory, Orders, Shipments, and Promotions • Distribution Center On Hand-Inventory, Forecast, Shipments

3.6.2.26. Retail Merchandising System (RMS) Integration The Retail Merchandising System (RMS) Integration provides an out-of the box integration of EDI 852 data coming from Oracle’s RMS system into Oracle’s Demand Signal Repository (DSR) module. The EDI 852 file from RMS populates DSR’s sales and return data, as well as on-hand inventory.

3.6.2.27. Web Services Integration

If you desire outbound integration with other Oracle or Non-Oracle applications, Demand Signal Repository includes a standards-based web services integration to support most common access scenarios including:

• Store POS, Orders, Forecasts, Shipments, and Promotions • On-Hand and In-Transit Inventory, Backorders, and Receipts

3.6.3. Release 12.1.2

3.6.3.1. Exception Management Dashboard

The Exception Management Dashboard automatically sifts through vast amounts of customer data to quickly detect potential problems in key business processes. Using OBIEE’s iBot functionality, pre-built queries can be run periodically, as needed, to locate issues and create exceptions.

Once exceptions have been created, the Exception Management Dashboard aggregates and displays exceptions by customer and product category, listing them in order from highest to lowest number of exception so users can address the most critical areas first.

The exception types analyzed within the Exception Management Dashboard include:

• Out of Stock Exception where on-hand quantity was reported as zero

• Imputed Out of Stock Exception where sales are significantly below expected sales and the probability is very high that the product is out of stock.

• Sales Forecast Accuracy Exception where sales forecast accuracy varies significantly from the average.


• Reorder Point Exception where inventory levels (on-hand plus back order quantity) are below the customer’s reorder point.

• Overstock Exception where on-hand inventory levels are above the customer’s reorder point.

• New Item Not Selling Exception which reports on items introduced at the store within the last 30 days which have no sales.

• In-flight Promotional Lift Exception which reports on promoted items whose sales is less than 110% of average sales.

• Promotional Pr ice Deviation Exception which reports where promotion price is discounted more than 10% of average selling price

From each one of these exception types users have the option to view one of the following reports to get more information.

• The Forecast Accuracy report shows actual versus forecasted sales, deviation between the two for the selected week as well as prior week.

• The Inventory Position report shows the previous week’s ending balance, receipts, sales and both an expected ending balance and an actual ending balance. The customer’s replenishment information (min, max, reorder point, etc.) is also displayed.

• The Item Distribution report shows the number of authorized stores and the number of authorized stores not selling, in addition to the average sales per store selling.

• The Price Deviation report shows average sales price, promotional price, quantity sold, actual revenue and expected revenue.

Exception history is retained to allow users to track trends on whether exceptions are increasing or decreasing.

3.6.3.2. All Commodity Volume (ACV) / External Measures

Many companies using Demand Signal Repository purchase consumption data from syndicated data providers to analyze market penetration by retailer, geography, product and time. The set of syndicated consumption data includes pre-calculated ACV measures as well as other measures such as sales by promotion type, baseline sales, and coupon sales. Syndicated consumption data can be purchased at various levels of the product hierarchy and customer organization hierarchy, as well as geographic region or sub-region.

DSR provides an initial set of 100 generic measures which are renamed during implementation to match the measures purchased. In addition, the number of measures can be extended, if needed.

When loading the external measures the product and geography keys supplied by the syndicated data provider are translated into the appropriate organization, product or geography hierarchy levels.


A sample set of measures along with an out-of-the-box report is available to use as is, or rename and revise based on specific customer needs.

3.6.3.3. TDLinx Store/Outlet Adapter

Demand Signal Repository has created an adapter to load AC Nielsen TDLinx store/outlet data. As a result, the existing set of business unit (store) attributes were enhanced to include additional data elements, such as status, sub-channel code, retail group, as well as other attributes.

The TDLinx store/outlet adapter maps data from the AC Nielson source CSV file to the Organization Business Unit Interface table. From there the existing Organization Hierarchy ETL process flow can be used to update the Organization Business Unit (DDR_R_BSNS_UNIT) target table.

3.6.3.4. Scorecard Enhancements (Goals & Thresholds)

The sales, operations and supply chain scorecards have been enhanced to improve usability (see illustration below). These enhancements include:

• Driving performance indicators (red, yellow green indicators) based on externally-loaded goals and thresholds.

• Monitoring weekly performance results as opposed to daily performance

• Color-coded performance indicators which are based on the loaded goals and thresholds.

• “Latest Results” are now based on weekly results, goals and thresholds. Previously, the latest results displayed daily values, which was too granular.

• “Overall Results” are now based on YTD results. Previously, the scorecard compared a yearly goal against the associated measure (e.g., unit sales) for a given year. This allows users to monitor performance throughout the year (rather than waiting until the end of the year).

In addition, the following enhancements were made to improve readability:

• Both the measure value and the color-coded performance indicator are displayed on the main scorecard pages

• When drilling down from the scorecard, the year filter criteria is passed to the underlying report. In addition, the associated chart is displayed first (before any table data)

On the operations scorecard, the Deduction Balance measure has replaced the Deduction Amount measure.


3.6.3.5. Store Clusters

DSR supports the ability to group “like” stores (or distribution centers) together to execute strategies related to specific store formats, consumer demographics, weather zones, or other characteristics. Each business unit (store or distribution center) may be associated to one or more store clusters.

The example below illustrates how stores from different retailers can be assigned to store clusters based on average income, lifestyle and geographic location. A store cluster report is available to analyze sales by store cluster type (e.g., Average income, Lifestyle, Coastal) to see breakdown of sales by each unique cluster.

3.6.4. Release 12.1.3

3.6.4.1. Manufacturer Promotions

Oracle Demand Signal Repository has been extended to include the capture and analysis of Manufacturer Promotions. The functionality within this feature includes:

• The ability to load manufacturer promotion information using out of the box generic interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows

• The ability to associate sales to a manufacturer promotion to report promoted vs. non-compliant sales (e.g., sales that should have been promoted)

• A new Manufacturer Promotion Dashboard which shows:

o Weekly sales compliance trend broken down by promoted and non-compliant sales

o Manufacturer promotion compliance by product category which displays promoted and non-promoted sales by product category


o Expected vs. actual promotion sales

o Expected vs. actual ACV % by manufacturer promotion

o Expected vs. actual sales by promotion type (e.g., display, feature, etc.) to analyze results by promotion tactic

o Promotion compliance by promotion type

• Context sensitive drilldowns are available from the manufacturer promotion dashboard to display:

o Manufacturer Promotion Summary Results which compare actual promotion results against expectations at the promotion/customer level.

o Manufacturer Promotion Detail Results which compare actual promotion results against expectations at the promotion/customer/SKU level.

3.6.4.2. Manufacturer Shipments

Manufacturers need visibility into products as they move downstream in the supply chain to the consumer. In previous releases, Oracle Demand Signal Repository provided visibility of products at customer locations (either distribution centers or retail stores), but did not have visibility into shipments leaving the manufacturer’s facilities.

Oracle Demand Signal Repository has been enhanced to capture manufacturer shipments to provide end to end visibility of products as they leave the manufacturer’s site all the way to the store and ultimate sale to the consumer. The functionality within this feature includes:

• The ability to load the manufacturer’s organization hierarchy to define locations from where product is shipped

• The ability to load manufacturer shipment information using out of the box generic interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows

• A new Shipment Dashboard which shows:

o Manufacturer shipment trend

o Customer sales trend (to compare against manufacturer shipments)

o Actual vs. forecasted customer shipments

o Customer shipments vs. receipts (by product category and business unit) to spot potential product diversion issues

o Customer shipment throughput of inbound shipments vs. outbound shipments

3.6.4.3. Customer Shipment Facts

As part of the manufacturer shipments enhancements, customer shipment facts were also enhanced to capture ship-to location and shipment cost information.

3.6.4.4. Third Party Distributors

Manufacturers may ship product to customers via third party distributors. In previous releases of Oracle Demand Signal Repository distributors were not distinguishable from other organizations (e.g., retailers). To provide better visibility into third party distributors, a new organization type has been created specifically for distributors. In


addition, a new distributor dashboard has been created. The functionality within this feature includes:

• Creation of a new Organization Type for distributors

• The ability to load distributor reference information using out of the box generic interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows. This includes loading:

o Distributor organization hierarchy

o Distributor item hierarchy

o Distributor business calendar

o Distributor replenishment rules

• The ability to load distributor fact information using out of the box generic interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows. This includes loading:

o Distributor shipments

o Distributor inventory

o Distributor shipment forecast (see Forecast Type and Purpose Code enhancement)

• Creation of a new Distributor dashboard which shows:

o Manufacturer shipments by distributor

o Distributor shipments by customer

o Weekly manufacturer shipment trend

o Forecast accuracy by distributor

o Distributor inventory by product category

o Customer shipments by distributor

o Distributor throughput (inbound and outbound shipments) by product Category

o Weekly distributor throughput trend

3.6.4.5. Alternate Organization Hierarchy

Since its inaugural release, Oracle Demand Signal Repository has had the ability to capture and analyze facts based on the customer’s view of their organization structure. Manufacturers and their supply chain partners (e.g., syndicated data providers) may have their own view of how the customer’s organization is structured for purposes of account management, promotion planning, collecting and aggregating consumption data, etc. This view is oftentimes different from how the customer views its organization structure.

The Alternate Organization Hierarchy feature allows alternate views of the customer’s organization to co-exist within DSR along with the original customer organization hierarchy. Facts can be inquired upon using the original customer organization hierarchy, or one or more alternate organization hierarchies.


The Alternate Organization Hierarchy provides a flexible organization structure, which can vary depending on the source of the data, or the type of analysis performed. For example:

Example 1 – Syndicated Data Provider. Manufacturers who subscribe to a syndicated data provider service for account information can load this information into the alternate organization hierarchy and leave the original customer organization hierarchy untouched, so that account team’s can still talk to customers in terms of the customer’s view of their organization.

Example 2 – Customer Buying Organization / Planning Hierarchy. The manufacturer’s own view of the customer’s organization may be based on how the customer’s buying organization is structured. When performing activities, such as promotion planning and execution, the promotion may apply to a level within the retailer’s organization, which represents the area for which a buyer is responsible. For example, a retail department (e.g., giftware, jewelry, etc.) or buying region (e.g., east, west, etc.). One or more of these views of the customer organization can be loaded to the alternate organization hierarchy.

The business benefits to having alternate organization hierarchies include:

• Ability to view customer data at aggregate levels that represent the various ways in which the manufacturer conducts business with the customer.

• Ability to analyze fact data at a level that is equivalent to other systems in use by the Manufacturer. For example, to analyze and report on DSR retail demand data by planning account (i.e., a level in an alternate organization hierarchy), which would be equivalent to the planning account used in Demantra Predictive Trade Planning or Siebel Consumer Goods.

The functionality within this feature includes:

• The ability to define the types of alternate organization hierarchies to be used (e.g., AC Nielsen, Buying Organization, etc.)

• The ability to configure the DSR repository to expose additional hierarchies and/or levels and name each level according to desired use (see additional information below)

• The ability to load alternate organization hierarchy information using out of the box generic interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows. Information loaded includes:

o The types of alternate organization hierarchies in use

o The attributes associated with each account within an alternate organization hierarchy, including a set of 20 user-defined attributes which can be customized, and the parent account to which each child account belongs.

o The association between a business unit (e.g., store or distribution center) and an account in the alternate organization hierarchy.

• The ability to associate syndicated consumption data to any account within an alternate organization hierarchy.

• A sample report, called Sales Performance by Account, has been made available to illustrate how the alternate organization can be used to build other reports.


Additional Information

DSR ships with a sample alternate organization hierarchy exposed in the Answers web catalog which has four levels exposed. To use additional alternate organization hierarchies, the DSR repository must be modified to define the number of levels being used and the names of each level to be exposed. Up to ten levels within an alternate organization hierarchy can be exposed without requiring any physical data model changes.

3.6.4.6. Forecast Type and Purpose Code

Prior to this release of Oracle Demand Signal Repository, forecasts were assumed to be sales related. In addition, there was no way to distinguish baseline from incremental forecast. As of this release, Oracle Demand Signal Repository has enhanced the forecast facts to provide additional types of forecast, as well as defining baseline vs. incremental forecast. The functionality within this feature includes:

• The ability to capture different types of forecasts coming from the retailer/customer. In one case, the forecast may represent projected store sales, while in other cases; the forecasts may represent projected orders or shipments for the distribution centers.

• To differentiate the types of forecasts provided by the retailer, the forecast data contains two additional attributes.

o Forecast Purpose. The forecast purpose code indicates whether a forecast represents a projected sales quantity (for stores), order quantity (for distribution locations), shipment quantity (for distribution locations) or a projected receipt quantity (for either stores or DCs).

o Forecast Type. The forecast type code indicates whether the forecast quantity includes only base demand (without promotional volumes), promotional demand only, or "total" demand (including both base and promo).

• Existing out of the box reports and dashboards were modified to specify that the forecast data being displayed had a Forecast Purpose code of SALES and a Forecast Type of TOTAL. This is to maintain parity with the original intent of the reports.

3.6.4.7. User Defined Fields

To provide flexibility in capturing additional attributes within Oracle Demand Signal Repository, without requiring changes to the physical data model, a set of 20 user-defined attributes (10 alphanumeric, 10 numeric) have been added to the entities listed below:

• Manufacturer Item Hierarchy (all levels)

• Organization Hierarchy (all levels)

• Retailer Item Hierarchy (all levels)

• Item Cluster Definition

• Retailer Cluster Definition


• Customer Promotion Plans

Manufacturer’s needing to capture additional attributes against these entities can leverage the out of the box interface tables and Oracle Warehouse Builder process flows without needing to make any customizations.

3.6.4.8. Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimensions

By default, Oracle Demand Signal Repository supports Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD) on the following dimensions:

• Organization

• Manufacturer Item Hierarchy

• Customer (Retail) Item Hierarchy

Historically, the Type 2 SCD feature is always turned on for these three dimensions. With this release, Type 2 SCD functionality can be turned off at implementation time to give customers the option whether to use this feature or not.

3.6.4.9. Item Clusters

Similar to store clusters, DSR supports the ability to group “like” SKUs together to evaluate sales strategies and promotional activities.

The example below illustrates how SKUs from different product categories can be assigned to item clusters based on average container material, primary shopper and brand perception.


3.6.4.10. Replenishment Rules

DSR supports the loading of customer replenishment rules to provide visibility into the criteria used by the store or distribution center when reordering products. This information can be used to determine whether out-of-stocks or overstocks are being caused by an inappropriate inventory management policy, or to anticipate future order volumes.

The replenishment rules are used by the exception management workbench to display over and under stock conditions. The replenishment rules are also accessible to the end user when building ad-hoc queries.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Global Order Promising 39

3.6.4.11. Allocation Rules

DSR has the ability to allocate POS and sales forecast facts received at an aggregate level to the business unit / day level. The time allocation and organization allocation percentages have been exposed in the BI Answers catalog, so end users can view the percentages that were used when allocating sales facts to the business unit or day level.

3.7. Oracle Global Order Promising

3.7.1. Release 12.1.1

There are no new features in Oracle Global Order Promising in Release 12.1.1.

3.7.2. Release 12.1.2

There are no new features in Oracle Global Order Promising in Release 12.1.2.

3.7.3. Release 12.1.3

3.7.3.1. Enhanced Forward ATP

Prior to this enhancement, during forward scheduling (when there is insufficient supply to promise a demand on its requested date, due to which GOP searches for supply later than the requested date), GOP would consider sources in rank order and select the first source that yielded a promise date less than or equal to the latest acceptable date. This did not guarantee that the source with the best promise date would get selected.

With this enhancement, GOP returns the best possible promise date by combining availability across all sources. The enhancement is enabled by enabling the profile

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Inventory Optimization 40

“MSC: Use Enhanced Forward ATP”. With this enhanced behavior, GOP uses iterative search logic to determine the most optimal promise date during forward scheduling. This feature increases the computation burden of the order promising calculation, and may impact GOP performance, especially in very constrained supply scenarios.

3.8. Oracle Inventory Optimization

3.8.1. Release 12.1.1

3.8.1.1. Support for Intermittent Demands

Inventory Optimization now explicitly supports forecasts that represent intermittent demands. Forecasts that are fed into IO from Service Parts Planning that have been generated using a statistical method designated as being for intermittent demands, or forecasts that are designated via plan options to be of the intermittent demand variety, will now be assumed by IO to have a more appropriate Poisson error distribution about the forecasted mean. In addition, IO intelligently distributes small calculated total safety stock targets across multiple echelons of a supply chain so that the location-specific targets are integer numbers.

3.8.2. Release 12.1.2

There are no new features in Oracle Inventory Optimization in Release 12.1.2.

3.8.3. Release 12.1.3

3.8.3.1. Enhanced Budget Constraints

Prior to this release, IO did not have the ability to ensure integer valued safety stock solutions within input budget constraints. A new heuristic ensures integer valued safety stocks while respecting input budget constraints. This new heuristic is enabled by setting the profile option “MSR: Budget Heuristic” to Yes (the default value is No).

A few points about the new heuristic:

• It is applicable only for a single level supply chain

• It is applicable only for plan level and organization level budgets

• It is applicable for both intermittent and non-intermittent demand streams

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Production Scheduling 41

3.9. Oracle Production Scheduling

3.9.1. Release 12.1.1

3.9.1.1. Units of Measure on Items

A “Unit Of Measure” has been added as an explicit attribute of every item. This enhancement provides improved visualization throughout the model and schedule views.

o A global “Unit Of Measure” tab has been added to the scenario properties where users can visualize / define units of measure.

o Integration processes automatically populate this list when PS is run in an integrated manner

3.9.1.2. Enhanced Alerts

In PS, Alerts have been broken down into four distinct categories (Work Order, Demand, Inventory and Resource) and various types within each.

These alert categories and types are added to the Model Workspace in the form of a tree control for easier navigation and summary data visualization


The alert view is now tab based and summarized by category / type and is context sensitive to selection within the Model Workspace for easier navigation

3.9.1.3. Work Order Centric KPI Comparisons

The KPI comparison view can now be viewed as either Demand centric or Work Order Centric. Via a new dropdown option, you can now understand the impact on the work order schedule when comparing scenarios.


3.9.1.4. Access Operation and Routings from Operation Instances

This usability enhancement allows the user to perform a right click on a given operation in any of the schedule Gantt charts and easily drill down to the operation and/or routing diagrams. This avoids the user having to navigate back through to the model workspace or the “where used” properties of a resource to in order to be open an operation.

3.9.1.5. Auto-create Work Orders Directly from Demands

For schedule prototyping purposes, scenario simulation purposes and/or product demonstrations, users sometimes create Work Orders directly in the PS in Work Order Editor using standard functionality. (i.e. Right click | Add Production Work Order). Once the work order is created, users usually peg these back to a given sales order.


This works well, but if there are many sales orders and the user wishes to create a work order for each demand / line item combination this could potentially take quite a bit of time.

A new feature has been added to PS that allows users to automatically create Work Orders for a given sales order without even navigating to the Work Order Editor.

A simple right click on a demand or a folder or a subset / mixture of folders and demands (via multi-select) allows users to automatically create a work order per demand.

3.9.1.6. Find Functionality for Model Objects

Find functionality is now available in PS using “CTRL-F” via the PS toolbar by selecting Edit | Find. This will launch a “Find” dialog box which provides text based searching in the PS model and the ability to drilldown to the “found” objects. You can limit the search to the following (by chosen scenario):

o All (will search all model objects listed below and their description fields as well) o Supplies and Demands only o Work Orders only o All Resources o Crews only o Machines only o Tools only o Items only o Operations only o Routings only Selecting and double clicking the result (or selecting the “Open button) will drilldown to the selected object. For example, double clicking the operation code will open the operation diagram


3.9.1.7. Visibility to Demand Fulfilled via Starting Inventory

In previous versions of PS, if an order was fulfilled from both production and either starting inventory or a supply event, the starting inventory was not simultaneously displayed in the Production Pegging view (only the Production). This release addresses this by explicitly detailing each of the pegging relationships.

This applies to materials, WIP and finished goods. The demand for “Item A” shows a green diamond at the start of horizon indicating some of the order is taken from inventory. The production below it indicates the remaining quantity is from manufacturing activities. “Material 1” is consumed in operation A and pegged to both an on-hand quantity and a purchase recommendation.

“Material 2” is pegged to starting inventory and an incoming purchase order, each represented with a diamond representing incoming supply

3.9.1.8. Automatic Reconciliation of Schedule Backlog

It is common to see shop floor backlog in the schedule views to notify the scheduler that the shop floor is behind and action should be taken to reconcile the situation. There are a variety of different scenarios which cause backlog in the schedule for example:

o Work order operations having a Firm Start Date, Firm End Date, or Firm Date Range in the past,

o >1 work order operations having an Active Status on the work order routing operation step which conflicts with another work order

o >1 work order operations with a “firm” status with overlapping date ranges

For example, in the screen capture below, the area shaded in yellow indicates a point in time that occurs prior to the horizon start.


While this provides excellent feedback to users, it also introduces another issue – the operations can not actually be run in the past. Prior to this release of PS, reconciling the schedule was primarily performed by using Cut | Paste in the Resource Gantt.

While this method worked well, it could potentially be somewhat cumbersome to do when there are many operations running behind and/or many resources in the model.

This release of PS provides the user with a right click menu item “Enforce Horizon Start” on resources. Enabling this flag (or setting it in the data model) and performing a repair solve will “push forward” all operations on that resource to the start of the horizon while maintaining operation sequence and at the same time respecting upstream / downstream precedence constraints. Enabling this flag (or setting it in the data model) and performing a coldsolve will accomplish the same thing without user intervention (i.e. Auto-reconciliation).

For example, in the diagram below, the operations running on Die Bonder 2 are running behind. The user selects Die Bonder 2, performs a right click, selects “Enforce Horizon Start” and performs a repair solve (or cold solve). (Users are also able to multi-select and enable this flag for all highlighted resources). The operations on the applicable resource are “pushed forward”, maintaining the original sequence. This can also be persisted in the data model for a given resource as well.

Operations running in the past will be pushed to start at the beginning of the horizon. The sequence of operations on the resource will not be changed. In many cases, the operations running behind will be one of several operations that are contained within a routing. Since routings have precedence constraints between operations, moving operations from the past to horizon start may have consequences on other operations in the routing. Any upstream or downstream pegged operations of this operation will be pushed forward (if precedence constraints dictate).

3.9.1.9. Batchable Resources

A “Batchable” resource can be described as a machine / oven / kiln (or similar) that can process one or more items simultaneously, but only if they share 1 or more similar “Attributes” (such as Temperature, Color, Duration etc) and “Attribute Value” such as 1 Hour @ 400 Degrees

Typically, these resources have several “spots” or something equivalent in them. Items when processes within these resources consume 1 or more of these spots.


This enhancement to PS enables the following behavior:

o Allows users to explicitly define a given resource as “Batchable” along with a minimum and maximum spot capacity

o Define a pull forward window to allow a resource to be filled to it’s minimum spot capacity

o Allow users to explicitly associate 1 or more user defined attributes and attribute values to an item. T

o Automatic grouping of operations on a batchable resource by attribute o If this is 1 attribute (such as temperature), all operations will be grouped

together of the same temperature up to the max capacity of the resource. o If the user groups by more than 1 attribute (for example temperature and

duration), this implies that all operations sharing the same duration and temperature will be run together to the max capacity of the resource.

o Manually move operations between batches if desired or manually move an entire batch. For example, if a sequence on a resource is scheduled to be 10 Hours at 500 Degrees followed by 12 Hours at 400 Degrees, the user can switch the order (via cut/paste, drag/drop, re-sequence in the resource gantt).

For example, the Resource Gantt below illustrates several ovens (CC4101 -> CC4105). Each of these ovens constrain a variety of operations which are running at the same time and grouped by temperature and duration. The summary colour at the oven level indicates spot utilization. Bubble help indicates the attributes of the batch and one can utilize an option in the Toolbar which allows you to highlight only certain batches if you wish (in orange).

Batches are of course applicable to regular manual scheduling activities. You can cut, paste entire batches between ovens, move operations from batch to another, resequence batches and even manually move operations into another batch which does not share the same attributes (you will be provided with a warning…).

3.9.1.10. Consistent Resource Assignment within a Portion of a Routing

Alternate resources in a given manufacturing operation are very common amongst most Production Scheduling customer models. These alternate resources are modeled via the use of resource sets. In many cases, this resource set recurs in an upstream or downstream operation(s). In many cases, it is imperative that once a resource is chosen in


an upstream operation, it must also be chosen in a downstream operation. This works well in PS and previously was a routing wide configurable option known as “Consistent Resource Assignment”. Users expressed the desire to be able to perform consistent resource assignment within only a selected group of operations within this routing - for example, operation steps 10, 20 and 30 must run on the same resource but steps 40,50 and 60 even though share a common resource with their preceding operations can run on the alternate. This enhancement in PS allows users to be able to configure PS to do just this.

Consider the following manufacturing routing. To make item “A”, it must through a setup, run and cleanup operation where it is then cooled. The item passes through a recursive process - Setup(2), Run(2), and Cleanup(2). With the exception of the Cooling operation, all operations run on either M1 or M2, as illustrated for the first Run operation.

When the first setup operation occurs on either M1 or M2, resource assignment

must be the same for the following 2 operation steps. If M1 is chosen in the setup operation, it must also be chosen in the run and cleanup.

(You don’t want to cleanup a machine that you didn’t run on). The cooling process occurs in a staging area. However, after the cooling operation

takes place, the same logic occurs for the next recurrence of the setup, run and cleanup operations, but a different alternate can be chosen.

The first three steps must run on the same machine and the last three steps must also run on the same machine.

The user opens up the properties of the routing and creates 2 distinct group and assigns the first 3 operations to the first group and the last 3 operations to the second group as illustrated.


The user performs a solve. The first three operations are run on M1. After the cooling operation, the remaining three operations are run on M2. This could of course all be on M1 or all of M2 or in reverse order. The point is the operations in the groups share the same resource.

If operations are not assigned to groups, they are permitted to be run on any given resource.

If the user is using All of Sets (i.e. >1 Resource such as a Machine1 and Tool1 OR a Machine2 and Tool2), consistent resource assignment applies to the group. i.e. The group must be the same.

When migrating a model from previous versions, the import will detect if a routing has consistent resource assignment selected and auto-create a group and assign all operations to it.

3.9.1.11. Resource-specific Cycle Times for Campaign Run Optimization

PS provides the ability to define:

o Minimum cycle times in various bucket sizes. In a previous release of PS, cycle size was either a Shift, Day or a Week. Cycle sizes are now flexible. For example, a cycle can be 2 weeks, 4 days etc.


If the resource specific cycle size checkbox is selected, planners can enable this flag by CRO resource. Therefore, different lines in the plant can be on their own cycle times rather than having to adhere to global cycle.

3.9.1.12. Minimize Work Order Schedule Infeasibilities

As Production Scheduling is a finite capacity scheduling application, some situations can occur which would result in an infeasible production schedule. These situations are always being monitored and resolved through improved data validation, alerting and solver handling of problematic inputs, and has drastically improved throughout the past several releases. This release continues to improve on this theme. For example, it is quite common and sometimes unavoidable to have:

o >1 work order operation firmed on a same single capacity resource with

overlapping date / times. o A firm date range on a work order operation which is shorter than total

operation run / elapsed time

In prior versions of PS:

o If the dates fell within the fixed time fence, PS would reconcile the infeasibility and alert the planner that shop floor backlog exists

o If these work order operations were outside of the fixed time fence this resulted in an infeasible schedule.

o In this release there is an added capability for the solver to resolve conflicts of this type outside of the fixed time fence if necessary to avoid this situation.

For example, take the following 2 work orders which are both firmed at the same time outside of the FTF:


Solved in a previous version – the schedule was infeasible and the planner was provided with an error message indicative of such.

In this release, the schedule is feasible. The highest priority work order is moved to start earlier in the horizon.

Supporting alerts are also provided to the user to indicate the firm date violation.

3.9.1.13. Disable Units of Effort for Setup and Cleanup Operations

PS has a differentiating feature introduced several releases ago which provides the ability to schedule Work Orders according to their individual “unit of effort.”

This feature cross references the routing template to “break down” work order operations into the lot multiples specified on the routing. The feature can be enabled as either a global option applying to all routings, or the user can specify the feature for specific routings. For example, if this feature is leveraged, a work order is scheduled to release inventory according to every lot multiple. In the example below, inventory is moved between operations in 25 unit increments – the work order has only 3 operations listed on it, but PS will break it down according to the routing lot multiple.

Inventory Production and Consumption is accurate Makespan is accurate Resource usage is accurate

In some cases, it is quite possible that the first operation may be a setup operation and the last operation may be a cleanup operation.


In this case, the setup & cleanup operations only need to be executed once as opposed to three times. This release of PS has the ability to specify an operation of type “Setup, Production or Cleanup”.

Setup and Cleanup operations will not be broken down to their units of effort.

3.9.1.14. Resource “All of” Sets

PS provides excellent resource offloading functionality within an operation (e.g. Machine 1 can be substituted for Machine 2, Crew 1 for Crew 2, etc.) via the use of “Resource Sets”. This type of set can be referred to as a “one of” type of set, meaning one of the resources within the set must be used. This release adds a new set type on operations that support resource replacement “groups” within PS ( an “All of” type of set).

This means that resource exclusivity relationships can now be defined directly within a given operation as opposed to having to use Operation Sets.

For example, Operator 1 can only run Line 1 and Line 3. Operator 2 can only run Line 3 and Line 2. The new operation structure within PS is depicted below.


The work order editor has a new column to indicate the name of the “all of” set. This is where manual overrides can be made to which set is attached to the work order. If an alternate set has a different number of resources, rows will be added / subtracted as appropriate.

Paste targets in the Gantt charts are consistent with previous versions of PS. Offloading to an alternate set will show the target in orange. Pasting to a different time on the same set will be highlighted in light blue.

A “1 of” resource set can contain a mixture of “All of” sets, plus single resources.


The “All of Sets” are shown in the Production Pegging View. The operations on the solver selected “All of Set” is summarized on the set name, so the user will have visibility into which “All of” set has been chosen without expanding all of the sets.

From an offloading perspective, The overall approach is virtually the same as previous versions of PS, but the offloading calculation must be applied to all members of the set. If any one of the resources within an “All of” set have their threshold violated, all resources will be offloaded. If any one of the resources in the target “All of” set have their offload thresholds violated prior to the offloading taking place, the operation will not be offloaded to that set. At this point, an additional alternate will be evaluated - if no alternates have available capacity, no offloading should take place. If the primary is significantly overloaded, offloading will still occur to less loaded (but still overloaded) alternates. This effectively spreads the load and will help get orders met as quickly as possible.

The PS “Consistent Resource Assignment” feature is also impacted by this enhancement. Prior to this release, Consistent Resource Assignment across routing steps was based on a single resource. If “Line 1” was chosen in Step 1 of a routing, it must also be chosen in a subsequent step. In this release, Consistent Resource Assignment applies to members of the “all of” set.


3.9.1.15. Hard Links Between Work Orders

This enhancement allows a “many to many” relationship amongst Work Orders along with the ability for the user to specify precedence constraints between these Work Orders. This is handy if a specific sequence is required between several work orders.

The business requirements for this enhancement are best explained with a simple example. Assume the following manufacturing process.

To make Item A, the following routing steps take place. The lot multiple across the manufacturing routing is 25 units. Item A is produced by Operation C.

Operation A consumes an inventory “Material A”.

Material A is a subassembly also manufactured in the plant as per the following process. The lot multiple across this routing is also 25 units. The material is produced by Operation C1.

Assume the user creates a work order for the finished good and the material (50 units each).

These Work Orders are related through inventory, so will generally schedule JIT and have some degree of overlap as illustrated below.


If the user wishes to explicitly relate these Work Orders to one another (for example for lot control, quality reasons etc), they can specify the relationship in the work order editor in the new “Related Work Orders” tab. Precedence relationships (to facilitate a cooling process, inspection etc) can also be specified, along with min / max separation constraints.

Assume the user populates “Starts After End” with a minimum separation time of 5 Hours. When “Units of Effort” is used, the 5 hour minimum separation is applied to the pegged work order routing instances. In this case, the Work Orders are for 50 units each (remember, the routing has a lot multiple of 25 units), therefore there are 2 routing instances and separation is applied twice.

The relationships between the Work Orders can be “many to many”.

• A given work order can be linked to many “next” work orders • A given work order can have many “previous” work orders.

Manual Scheduling within PS will have all appropriate precedence relationships respected.


3.9.1.16. Dynamic Throughput Rates on Resources

Some customers vary their production rates fairly dynamically and frequently. For example, the speed of a line can change daily or weekly based on available labor. The net effect of dynamic rate changes is simple – they make a given manufacturing operation take more or less time to complete in a given time interval.

There are various reasons why the speed of a production line may change which may include (but by no means are limited to) areas such as:

• trial manufacturing • process changes • line improvements • labour constraints • new product development • temperature / humidity variations

This release of PS provides the user with the ability to specify dynamic rates on a resource (crew, machine, tool).

For example, Packing Line #1 produces items, A, B, C and D. At “normal” speeds, it produces product at a rate of 100 units per hour. In this example, Item D is produced in runs of 1700 units per week.

Assume due to a labour constraint, the packer now runs at the following throughput rates:

• 80% in the 1st week • 100% in the 2nd week • 150% in the 3rd week

The user navigates to the Packer resource properties to the “Throughput tab” and defines the appropriate dynamic percentages.


The speed at which the items are produced can clearly be seen in Gantt chart by the operation length as well as by looking at the steepness of the slope of the item graph for a given item.

If >1 resource on the operation also has a dynamic throughput range, the “lowest” value for a given time interval “wins”. For example, if an operation requires both “Packer 1” and “Tool 1” and they have competing dynamic throughput rates and effective ranges.

In a resource set, resources can have different throughput rates for different date ranges. If production is offloaded to an alternate resource with a different throughput, the operation duration on the alternate resource will reflect the new throughput.


If an operation is moved to a timeslot via manual scheduling (Cut | Paste, Resequencing, Remove Idle etc) that has a different throughput rate defined, the operation duration should change according to the throughput in effect.

If the user offloads an operation manually to a different resource with a different rate, the operation duration will change according to the throughput in effect.

If the user changes the rate on a resource and runs a repair solve, the repair solve will recognize and change the duration of the operation accordingly.

3.9.1.17. PS Data Connector Port to Sun, HP and AIX

The PS SCBM / Oracle EBS data connector now runs on the following platforms:

Windows (previously supported) Linux (previously supported) Sun (New) HP (New) AIX (New)

This allows for the PS connector to be deployed on a central server apart from PS if desired. All command syntaxes stays the same

3.9.1.18. Export Selected Model Data During Schedule Publish

As part of the File | Publish process, users now have the ability to publish the PS model or chosen objects of the data model in XML format. (i.e. changeover rules, groups, crews, machines, tools, operations etc).

This is useful if PS is to be the system of record for any data that is not available within the ERP system.

The next time a model is imported into PS, integration processes could be extended to reference the various data model elements exported from the previous scheduling session which could amend to the new model prior to import

A new tab in the Publish Profiles allows users to define which data objects to publish

Whenever the Publish Process is called (whether in batch or interactively), the chosen data will be exported to a user named XML file.

Interactively, the published model is based off of the approved schedule Since the schedule publish process batch file points to a named scenario, you can export the model from any given scenario which may or may not be the approved schedule.

Aspects of the model can be output to a user defined filename – any object within the model can be output to this specific file.


3.9.1.19. PS XML Model – Unique Extension

The PS XML data files which can be imported and exported now have an additional extension available. The PS XML non compressed file can be the standard .xml extension or uniquely to PS as an .ops. The .ops file is still standard XML format, but will launch PS directly upon being double clicked. The PS XML compressed file can be the standard .xml.gz extension or uniquely to PS as an .opz. The .opz file is still standard compressed XML format, but will launch PS directly upon being double clicked. The icon for either is the PS standard icon.

3.9.1.20. Enhanced Auto-generated Routings The list below outlines a few typical scenarios that cause “Auto-Generation” of Operations and Routing templates based on work order structure within Production Scheduling: Work orders which were generated in a “Configurator” program. Essentially,

Work Orders are dynamically created and passed to PS. No corresponding routing exists in PS.

Non-standard crews, machines or tools included on the work order bill of resource.

Contrary to the above, sometimes the work order would be missing crews, machines or tools on work order operations.

Non-standard items included on the work order bill of material. Missing items on the work order bill of material Additional operations included on the work order routing. Missing operations on the work order routing (for example, Oracle EBS does not

pass “Closed” work order operations to PS). Operation Sets specified on the work order routing


In a previous release of PS, a new feature was added to PS which removed the PS dependency on having a routing template pre-created in the model for every work order in the application. For those scenarios outlined, PS dynamically cross references the work order routing against the routing template during the import process. If a work order meets on of the problematic scenarios outlined earlier, one can expect to see a newly created routing which directly corresponds to the work order in question. If operations differ from their standard templates, a newly created operation will be present in the routing as well.

When PS was generating this routing and operation templates, it was not reading the precedence constraints on the work order routing between the operations, nor were the resource sets being constructed. This release of PS has enhanced logic in the import process which addresses these 2 issues. When generating the precedence constraints for the auto-generated routing, the import now looks at the operation codes and cross references the precedence constraints on the routing. If the work order has different precedence constraints than the routing template, the precedence constraints as specified on the work order routing will be used when the auto-generated routing is created. Similarly for resource sets - the operation template is reference to reconstruct the resource sets.

3.9.1.21. Selective Work Order Release to Production

After a user approves a schedule within PS, the general business process is to publish the schedule back to ERP. The publish process within PS uses a “Release” timefence to filter out work orders from the release process. If a work order starts before the end of this timefence, it will be included in the release. If the user wishes to include / exclude individual work orders from this process (regardless of start time), this was not possible prior to this release. This new release provides a new mechanism for the user to be able to individually select which work orders are released back to ERP.

For example, after analyzing the schedule, the user approves the schedule he/she is happy with. The user then performs a right click on the scenario name and selects a new option “Edit Work Order Release”.

This launches a new dialog view which lists all work orders and their various attributes. The Publish Profile selected has a Release Horizon. Any Work Orders starting within this release horizon will be auto-selected. The user can override this if desired.


3.9.2. Release 12.1.2

3.9.2.1. Resource Business Objectives

From a resource perspective, Production Scheduling generically considers all crew, machine, tool capacity and calendar constraints simultaneously when sequencing operations. Focusing and resolving the most critical constraints in the scheduling horizon has been regarded as the most effective scheduling strategy to resolve multi-stage floating bottleneck problems when sequencing operations. Addressing the most critical constraints first breaks down sequencing problems into smaller sub-problems which are generally “easier” to resolve.

However, it sometimes is desirable for users to be able to dictate to the Production Scheduling solver which resources to focus on first.

Currently in Production Scheduling, users can dictate to the solver engine which resource or group of resources should be focused on and in what order - essentially enabling scheduling in an incremental fashion via some simple configuration in the application. However, solver objectives cannot be set changed each stage – they are set at a global level.

The scope of this enhancement is to allow different solver objectives by solve stage. For example, one may wish to optimize changeovers on the injection molder, then mix the upstream materials JIT, then immediately pack the kits and assemblies from the molding using a prebuild solve strategy. This approach optimizes the bottleneck stage while minimizing WIP between upstream / downstream stages.

This enhancement will allow users to:

1) Set solver objectives by group of resources (i.e. a Stage)

2) Insert breakpoints where the user can review solve progress at any given stage (and even refine the schedule as appropriate via manual scheduling and then resume the larger solve process).


3) Setup Multi-stage Campaign Run Optimization (CRO) – users will have the ability the utilize the CRO algorithm in a multi-stage fashion provided the stages have decoupling inventory and the CRO resource is not recursive.

This enhancement will have many benefits including:

• Increase PS market applicability • Address business where multi-stage strategies are necessary • Minimization of Work In Progress Inventory (Directly address make | store | pack

requirements) • Reduce cost of ownership for our customers

• Directly enabling user scheduling strategy this eliminating potential complex workarounds to achieve desired results

• Allow multi-stage use of the Campaign Run Optimization Algorithm which also provides: • Multi-stage routing offloading • Improved alternate resource selection • Multi-level SDS minimization and min run length

3.9.2.2. Production Scheduling as a Web Service Call

Production Scheduling has been enhanced to be able to be called as a service - the solver and application have been decoupled such that the import and solve process can optionally be run on the server – this includes Linux, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX platforms. The user interface continues to run on the planners windows client (includes support for Vista).

This enables Production Scheduling users to have their models presolved on the server – saving time and improving efficiency. It also allows for batch solving of multiple plans (i.e. Automation of the “what if” process).

The server side functionality creates a deployable solved model which includes import and solver statistics in log files which are all downloaded to the client desktop on planner request. This enhancement also includes improved application status logging and filtering - including access to various event statuses and solver statistics log from within Production Scheduling for events which took place on the server.

3.9.2.3. Undo Functionality for Manual Scheduling Manual Scheduling in Production Scheduling includes a variety of activities such as: Cut/Paste Resequence


Remove idle Change durations of operation instances Change start or end times of operations Change calendar events in the Gantt charts (add / remove / change) Change resource assignment (i.e. manually offload) Fixing / Unfixing operations (single or multiple operations) Change lead times for Purchase Order Recommendations. Following each of these actions, there is a repair based solve action to institute the change and “ repair” any upstream / downstream ramifications this change may have caused. However it is possible that the user may not accept the repaired schedule or simply made a mistake when implementing this change. This enhancement to Production Scheduling provides the ability to “Undo” these changes. The Undo action reverts back to the previous “solve state” prior to the change. Examples include: Action: { manual change} | UNDO Result: Will undo the manual change Action: { manual change} | Repair | UNDO Result: Will undo the repair and manual change Action: { manual change} | { manual change} | UNDO | … Result: Will undo both manual changes Action: { manual change} | { manual change} | Repair | UNDO Result: Will undo the repair and manual changes Action: { manual change} | Repair | { manual change} | Repair | UNDO Result: Will undo the 2nd repair and 2nd manual change Action: { manual change} | Repair | { manual change} | Repair | UNDO | UNDO Result: Will undo the both repairs and both manual changes Undo also applies to another new feature in Production Scheduling (Resource Business Objectives). Included in this feature is the ability to solve groups of resources in a “Stage” and perform manual scheduling activities between stages (i.e. At a breakpoint) in the solve process. Undo can be performed within this context as well. This includes the ability to undo manual changes in the stage itself as well as to completely undo a given “stage” of the solve process - upon which the solution will revert back to the previous solved “stage” . For example: Action: { solve stage | breakpoint} | manual change | Repair | Undo Result: Will undo the manual change Action: { solve stage} | { solve stage | breakpoint} Undo Result: Will undo the 2nd solve stage – result will revert back to the first solve stage


3.9.2.4. Attribute Based Sequence Dependent Setups This enhancement to Production Scheduling is two-fold: 1) Improves the current sequence dependent setup rule representation to be Attribute

based rather than having to specify rules by operation code or group. Users will now have the ability to specify changeover rules by attribute type / value. For example, providing the ability to specify a Flavour Changeover (Attribute) which includes Apple -> Blueberry (Attribute Values) etc. The Production Scheduling integration to Oracle EBS will use Setup Type as an attribute and various values associated with Setup Type as the appropriate Attribute Values.

2) Extend sequence dependent setups to Batchable resources, which currently do not

have these setups either represented or optimized.

Operations and Groups will have attributes assigned to them. Changeover rules specified by attribute will automatically associated all operations sharing the same attribute.


This enhancement to Production Scheduling also allows the user to specify if changeovers can be concurrent or sequential if multiple attributes are specified and can be performed at once. For example – if I am performing a size changeover, can the flavor changeover be performed at the same time or does it have to follow the size changeover?

3.9.2.5. Visualization of Campaign Run Optimization Cycle Boundaries This enhancement allows users to explicitly visualize manufacturing cycle boundaries when using Campaign Run Optimization. This provides for improved visibility to changeover patterns in and across manufacturing cycle boundaries.


CRO Manufacturing Cycle Boundaries shown in brown.

3.9.2.6. New Alert Type and Drilldowns A new “Resource Utilization” alert has been introduced to indicate when resources which are not part of a bottleneck resource group have capacity violations (when capacity constraints are relaxed) Drilldowns to the Gantt charts from all resource alerts are included this new alert as well.

When using Batchable resources, drilldowns are also now provided from the “Minimum Batch Violation” alerts as previous versions did not allow this.


3.9.2.7. Drilldowns from the Work Order Editor to the Gantt Charts Additional drilldowns introduced in the application make finding work orders in the Gantt charts much easier. The drilldown from the work order editor which is launched via right click in the editor from the operation code takes the user directly to either the Production Pegging view, the Resource or Operation Gantt views. Drilldown from the Work Order Editor highlights the selected operation and performs a context sensitive zoom as well.

Drilldown zooms and highlights the application operation:


3.9.2.8. Mass Change on Items and Resources For mass change simulations, Production Scheduling now provides the ability to mass edit item and resource properties. All item properties and resource properties can easily be changed simply by multi-selecting the appropriate items or resources in the model workspace and invoking the “change” function. Change is specific to the scenario and session only for simulation and scenario comparison purposes (changes are not sent back to ERP) Changing Item Data via right click on >1 items and selection of “Change” in the menu:

Mass Change of Resource Data:


3.9.3. Release 12.1.3

3.9.3.1. Maintenance Work Order Scheduling

The scheduling of maintenance resources at a maintenance depot can be quite complex. Several new constructs have been introduced into PS to allow for this: Visits – This new data construct allows users to associate one or more work orders, where the work orders will fall inside Visit envelope dates such as the anticipated aircraft arrival into a maintenance depot and the request date associated with the completion of the Visit. Milestones – These provide the ability to specify logical groupings of work orders within a Visit. The combination of Visits and Milestones provides a capability to define task hierarchies that flexibly group work orders together in both concurrent and sequential patterns where work can diverge and converge. Work Breakdown Structure – Several new key attributes have been added to work orders which can be used for organizing and filtering work orders. The scheduling of visits must take into consideration numerous constraints. It must account for:

• Visit start / end dates • Visit milestones • Task hierarchies • Crew, machine, tool, and material constraints • Operation / work order precedence constraints • Grouping of work based on work breakdown structure

To support these requirements, the following key capabilities are now available in Oracle Production Scheduling:

Collection of Oracle cMRO Work Orders Production Scheduling now optionally collects Oracle CMRO maintenance work orders. New Operational Data Store Tables for Data Augmentation Six new tables, housing information such as visits, work breakdown structure, work order relationships, and milestones, have been added into the Operational Data Store (ODS) as this information is required to properly schedule cMRO work orders. Currently, this information is not available to standard planning collections from cMRO. An API into these new tables to augment collected data has been added to complement the existing collections framework as PS requires this information to generate a maintenance schedule. The overall architecture is represented in the following diagram.


Support for Visits, Milestones, and Complex Task Hierarchy Relationships Visits have been added to Oracle Production Scheduling to allow for scheduling, tracking, and grouping of tasks in the form of work orders and milestones. Visits and milestones are presented in various views in Production Scheduling and allow the planner to leverage the rich set of existing functionality to review and refine the schedule. Visits and milestones also present new constraints which govern the production schedule that is generated.

Advanced Work Order Filtering Work order filters can be used to facilitate the review and analysis of the schedule and allow the planner to “slice and dice” the data in the various Gantt, Utilization, and Work Order views. This feature allows the planner to hone in on specific tasks and answer questions such as “show me all work orders in stage 3a from July 2-July 4 utilizing the Advanced Airframe and Power crew which are firm”. While this feature has been added to facilitate cMRO workflows, it will benefit many of our existing manufacturing customers as they will also be able to filter on many of the existing constructs already available in work orders.


Representation of Work Breakdown Structure The logical grouping of work can be accomplished by leveraging the Work Breakdown Structure constructs in PS. A Display Parameter tab has been augmented in the Plan options screen with new data that can be used to create logical groupings of work orders.

The work breakdown structure is populated as work order attributes and can be viewed in the work order editor. This allows for advanced filtering in Work Order Filters where they can be used to group work orders in the various views when analyzing the schedule.


Once the model is reviewed and analyzed in Production Scheduling, work order dates generated by the schedule and can than be released back to cMRO for execution.

The solution may be applicable for other industries with similar requirements, but focus has been on solving aircraft short term maintenance scheduling problems.

3.9.3.2. Disable Multiple Release from the Same Plan for the Same Order This enhancement allows Production Scheduling to keep track of work orders which are sent back to source as “Released” and disable subsequent release from the same plan to


prevent creating duplicate supplies in the ERP system. This process functions per the procedure below: • The user generates a plan and downloads to the client per standard procedures. • The user solves the model (if not already solved on the server). • The user then saves the schedule as a .dxt file (PS persistence for solved models).

This is a key step, as re-importing from XML source will not preserve this information.

• Once the scheduler is happy with the plan, the user will then approve or “Release” selected Work Orders to source and publish to ASCP as she/he deems appropriate (no change to existing functionality).

• After this action, the user will not be able to release the same work orders from the application as the checkbox indicating which work orders to release will be grayed out. The user is also free to close the model and reopen the .dxt file as necessary. Illustration: The user selects the first four work orders for release:

The user “releases” back to source:

On subsequent navigation to the Release View, the Work Order Release Checkbox is no longer selectable for those work orders:


• If the user does want to release the same work orders again for some reason, they can open the original XML file that was downloaded from integration.

• Any work orders not previously marked as released will still be available for release or publish (as planned orders) into ASCP.

3.9.3.3. User Defined Ideal Sequence Production Scheduling natively provides the ability to dynamically calculate an ideal operation sequence for Campaign Run Optimized Resources per manufacturing cycle. This is based on changeover cost or time (user specified) in the Scenario / Solver Options. The changeover matrix contains the applicable penalty factors of moving between different operations producing different items. The solver performs an evaluation of these penalties and computes the ideal sequence on this resource. CRO then optimally computes the tradeoff between carrying inventory, stocking out, incurring changeovers, using alternate machines, alternate routings or violating safety stock in and across manufacturing cycles and may optionally pull work forward to delay operations appropriately.

In many environments, users simply wish to dictate this order of operations to the solver in lieu of having to construct a penalty matrix to influence this. While this is possible to configure using costs, this enhancement allows users to specify the sequence operations should be scheduled in CRO according to attribute. This is an alternate sequencing strategy compared to the current CRO sequencing strategies of Cost or Time, and is available for CRO resources only.

Solver options are enhanced to indicate the Run Sequence as User Defined (by solve stage, as illustrated, or in the global solver options):


The mechanism in which the “ideal” sequence is defined is by selecting and sorting of associated attributes and their attribute values on CRO resources in the model.

For example, take attributes “Size” and “Grade”. Within “Size” there are 1/4 Inch, 1/3 Inch and 1/4 Inch as attribute values. Within the “Grade” attribute, there are Grades A and B.

Assume the user defined Ideal Sequence is to cycle by size and grade within the size, as outlined in the following example:

1/4 Inch-Grade A -> 1/4 Inch Grade B -> 1/3 Inch-Grade A -> 1/3 Inch Grade B -> 1/2 Inch-Grade A -> 1/2 Inch Grade B.

This would be setup in Production Scheduling in the Attributes tab where attributes are associated to resources.

Essentially, the “order” in which the selected attributes and attribute values in the right column are structured in the UI dictates the ideal sequence of operations (the operations must be associated to these attributes). If Grade was more important than size, then the user


could move the Grade above the Size Attribute. The sequence would then cycle by Grade and then Size within the Grade.

This is a very powerful tool to help make sequencing decisions and reduce changeovers in the model.

3.9.3.4. Supply Tolerancing The Production Scheduling integration infrastructure to Oracle EBS and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne uses “Work Orders” as the vehicle to communicate production requirements and schedules between systems. When a PS plan is created, it will have Work Orders as a source of supply. Demands are created via Sales Orders, Transfer Orders Out, Forecasts, and Internal Sales Orders, etc. Since PS is a scheduling application, typically one would assume there are sufficient supply quantities generated in the form of work orders to meet the stated demand requirements for the organization being scheduled by the time you are actually scheduling your facility. However, in some cases it is acceptable for demands to be shorted by a certain quantity or percentage without the generation of additional supply requirements. For example, if you have supply (say an on-hand inventory of 134,999) and have an order quantity of 135,000 (finished good or intermediate), there may not be an additional work order created for the extra 1 unit in ASCP (lot sized of course) due to a supply tolerancing feature it has (this can be at any level in the bill of material). However, PS does not have this explicit supply tolerancing feature. The net result is that PS may recommend extra production as PS sees the need to balance supply and demand down to the unit. PS naturally uses the routing lot size to recommend new production - in some cases, this could be very large (such as 100,000lbs per run) and completely unnecessary as it is perfectly acceptable to ship 1lb less than order size. Instantiating net new production disrupts other production runs, steals capacity and materials – schedule quality is inevitably diminished. A feature has been added to Production Scheduling to be able to essentially “shut off” any PS created net new production suggestions to avoid these situations. This exists in Tools | Options | Global Settings:


With this flag enabled, there will be no net new production recommendations generated at any level in the BOM (i.e. only work order supply production will be scheduled). If there is insufficient work order supply, inventory will be automatically added to prevent levels from falling below zero (i.e. Demand is permitted to be shorted). A PS log message is generated to indicate what inventory quantity adjustments were made. Utilizing this feature assumes work order supply is sufficient to meet demand.

3.9.3.5. Control Application of Purchase Item Order Multiples Beyond Lead Time Items marked as “Purchased” in Production Scheduling must be associated with a source of supply (i.e. a Supplier) and a corresponding order multiple must be modeled. It is key to note that Production Scheduling is not intended to plan procurement specifically, but to be constrained by lead time only. Beyond lead time, supply for these purchased items is essentially unconstrained – therefore the purchase item multiple is not especially relevant. However, customers do find these order multiples to be useful for various types of modeling approaches. A feature has been added to be able to control whether or not purchase item multiples are respected beyond supplier lead time or not. Keeping these “relaxed” helps solve performance and is generally recommended. In the PS Plan Solver Options, there is a flag entitled “Relax Purchase Items Beyond Lead Time”. Default is set to ‘Yes”.


When this flag is enabled, the order multiple is internally set to a very large value and effectively ignored beyond lead time – one will see the addition of a new red line in the item graph to represent the time of the item. Beyond the lead time, the item graph is shaded to indicate infinite supply.

If the flag is set to “No”, the item graph is displayed taking into account the order multiples.


3.9.3.6. Improved Operation Status Logic in OPM integration

If an OPM Batch Operation has a “firm start” resource but is still in pending state, the PS integration code was previously interpreting this operation as Active when importing into Production Scheduling. In order to address this, VCP collections introduced a new column entitled “operation_status”. The OPM system will populate the operation status as Pending, WIP or Closed. The corresponding PS integration code has been modified to read this new status from this new column to set an operation as Open, Active or Closed in Production Scheduling.

3.9.3.7. Advanced Work Order Filtering

This release provides new work order filtering capabilities which allows planners to further “slice and dice” data in the various Gantt, Utilization, and Pegging views in a multi-dimensional fashion and filter the content of these views. This feature allows the planner to hone in on specific areas of the schedule only – for example “show me all work orders in from October 25 – November 5 running on Resource (or Group) which have a Firm Start status”. The results are previewed in the bottom of the filtering view and planners can drill-down to the Work Order Editor directly from here as well if desired.


A new “Work Order Filter” view has been added to PS which is accessible off of the toolbar.

Selecting the icon launch the filtering window. The user then inputs criteria. Selecting “OK” will filter out the various Gantt Charts.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Content Document Oracle Rapid Planning – New Product 83

You can create as many filters as you like which are specific for various analysis purposes and even save them locally as a file (and send to your colleagues).

This is a very useful feature which provides a very advanced level of filtering capability into an already rich user interface.

3.10. Oracle Rapid Planning – New Product


Oracle Rapid Planning is a fast, heuristic based engine that generates supply chain plans that span the enterprise manufacturing and distribution networks covering the supply chain from supplies to customers. Rapid Planning delivers fast, comprehensive plans that respect material and resource capacity constraints.

Oracle Rapid Planning provides users an ability to simulate and quickly evaluate impacts of various changes in demand and supply conditions. It allows planners to evaluate the consequences of these changes and also compare and contrast various alternative courses of action based upon user configurable metrics.


Rapid Planning leverages the integration capabilities of the Value Chain Planning suite which means it can be deployed and integrated out-of-the-box with Oracle E-Business Suite or with heterogeneous back-end systems. Rapid Planning is integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite R12.1 and R11i10. Rapid Planning utilizes the proven Advanced Planning collections architecture to integrate your source system reference and transaction data to the Rapid Planning engine.

3.10.2. Release 12.1.3

Oracle Rapid Planning supports the following:

3.10.2.1. Fast Simulation

Oracle Rapid Planning uses an in-memory engine that can very quickly react and recompute the impacts of any user changes and report, in real time, the consequences across the supply chain. It also re-calculates the exceptions, key performance indicators to reflect these impacts.

Rapid Planning supports input of simulation changes to master data like items, resources, bills of materials, routing operations in two ways:

• Change the master data inside a particular plan and re-solve • Change the master data in a simulation set for repetitive use in more than one

plan

The planning engine can be invoked in three different modes

• With snapshot and complete replan • Without snapshot, but complete replan • Without snapshot, but replan only incremental changes

3.10.2.2. Flexible User Interface

This application enables a completely new rich-client user interface built using 11gR1 Fusion Middleware technologies and supports configurable workspaces, flexible layouts, dynamic tabs, etc. to make the user experience very productive as well as easy to use.

3.10.2.3. Simulation Sets

Oracle Rapid Planning makes simulations very easy through the powerful feature of simulation sets. A simulation set is a collection of changes to the attributes of any of the following master data entities.

• Items • End Item Substitution relationships • Resources • Routings and operations • Routing Operation Networks • Bill of Materials, components and substitutes • Resource Availability • Manufacturing Order Resource Requirements • Manufacturing Order Operation Networks • Calendars • Supplier capacity


This feature enables planners to do “what-if” analysis without having to make these changes permanent or without the need to make these changes in the source ERP systems and re-collect to see their impacts. This saves a lot of time and effort for the planners.

These simulation sets can then be referenced in different plans through a plan option.

3.10.2.4. Mass Edits

Users can make quickly make updates on a large number of rows (for example, increase the post-processing leadtime of all items in category ‘ABC’ by 10%) through the mass-edit feature.

This feature is supported for almost all entities like items, resources, supplies, demands, etc. Users can update using various operators like “set value to”, “increase by”, “decrease by”, “increasy by %”, “decrease by %”, etc.

Users can undo the simulation changes at an attirbute-level by using “set value to original” operator to revert to the original value.

3.10.2.5. Plan Comparisons

Oracle Rapid Planning allows users to quickly make multiple copies and then use them as alternatives for corrective actions. Once the plans are run, users can compare any two plans (or one plan with its previous run) inside any of the following four views:

• All analytics - reports and graphs • All exception views • Supply and Demand view • Material and Resource horizontal plans

In addition, users can use order-by-order comparison view where they can compare any two plans (or a single plan with its previous run) and make the following comparions:

• Was on-time, but now late • Was late, but now on-time • Was late, but now less late • Was late, but now more late

3.10.2.6. Aggregate, Editable Material Horizontal View

The application supports a material plan with a layout wizard that lets the users to customize the layout including the measures displayed, time granularity, etc. Users can also specify two aggregation levels from a choice of Organization, Product Cateogry, Product Family and Item.

The aggregations are done real-time and take into account all current user changes, firming, etc.

Users can also update the aggregate level horizontal plans. For example, users can update forecast quantity at the product category or even at a period level. The system will allocate the updates to individual items and days.

3.10.2.7. All-in-one Supply/Demand View

Oracle Rapid Planning enables an integrated view of supply/demand orders and their associated pegging. In a single view, users can drill either upstream or downstream to


view the supply chain from a single order. This enables for a consolidated view of the entire tree without having to switch between multiple views.

Users can also focus an a single order upstream or downstream and then reverse direction to look at the “where-used” or the opposite views. They can then retrace the steps back to original state of the supply/demand view

3.10.2.8. Integration with Advanced Planning Command Center

Oracle Rapid Planning comes with pre-built integration with Advanced Planning Command Center. Rapid Planning plans can be archived, published to Advanced Planning Command Center. These archived versions can then be viewed in all the related reports and dashboards.

The Advanced Planning Command Center’s Supply Chain Analyst dashboard supports drill-down directly into the Rapid Planning Application.

All Rapid Planning Simulation plans can be used in the Process Automation functionality to build process flows in Advanced Planning Command Center.

3.10.2.9. Unconstrained Planning

Planners can run Rapid Planning in an unconstrained mode. The unconstrained option allows planners to see the required material availability and resource capacity to find what needs to be arranged in order to meet all demands on time. The unconstrained plan output can optionally respect the planning time fence to allow planners to freeze the plan for the initial period. Rapid Planning unconstrained planning can also calculate resource requirements to generate resource usage and resource overload data..

Rapid Planning unconstrained plans produce a full complement of exception messages to alert the planner to critical constraint violations. These exception messages include “Orders with Insufficient Lead Time”, “Resource Overloaded”, and “Supplier Capacity Violated”. In addition, problems with specific demands are highlighted by the exception messages for sales orders and forecasts at risk due to material shortages or resource shortages.

3.10.2.10. Constrained Planning

Rapid Planning offers a full set of constrained planning features. Rapid Planning performs simultaneous material and resource capacity constraint based planning. Rapid Planning output is constrained by purchasing, distribution and transit lead times, by resource calendars and capacities, and by supplier capacity. Rapid Planning calculates the capacities consumed by existing WIP schedules and purchased supplies and allocates the remaining capacity to new planned orders.

Constrained planning allows planners to automate many types of planning decisions and focus on the critical issues. Rapid Planning constraint based planning includes the ability to search among many alternate supply types. Rapid Planning can automatically search for and find alternates and substitutes across the supply chain and create planned orders to meet demands on time. When the primary supply source is late, Rapid Planning searches for the entire supply chain for item substitutes, alternate organizations, alternate suppliers, alternate BOM and routing, alternate resources and substitute components to locate the supply source that provides the delivery date closest the demand due date.


3.10.2.11. Demand Forecasts

Rapid Planning utilizes forecast and demand data from Oracle Demantra. Oracle Demand Planning integration to Oracle Rapid Planning is not supported. Rapid Planning performs forecast consumption and allows the planner to optionally explode forecasts.

The forecast consumption features allow the planner to include both forecasts and actual sales orders without double counting demand. Planners can select the enforce demand time fence plan option and forecasts inside the demand time fence are not included as demands in the plan.

During plan definition, the planner can select forecast spreading option. For example, if the forecast is a weekly forecast, the planner can choose to spread the forecast to daily buckets and also optionally set the forecast consumption forward and backward day controls. This allows the planner to accept aggregate (weekly or period) forecasts and more accurately plan supplies in daily buckets.

3.10.2.12. Respect Demand Priority Rules

Demand priority rules can be specified at the plan level, allowing the planner to easily compare results from two different plans using different demand prioritization approaches. Demand priority rules control the sequence of demand priorities assigned to all demands. The most urgent demands have the best chance of being satisfied on time. Alternatively, Rapid Planning can use externally specified demand priorities for sales orders and forecasts.

3.10.2.13. Demand and Supply Pegging

Rapid Planning pegging links supplies to demands so that the planner can easily identify demand impacts when supply dates change. The planner can use pegging to trace component or resource problems up to the affected sales orders. Pegging also enables the planner to identify which supplies are linked to critical demands and ensure that those supplies remain on schedule.

3.10.2.14. Supply Chain Sourcing

Rapid Planning is compatible with the sourcing rules, bills of distribution and assignment sets used by Oracle Purchasing or upload supply chain sourcing definitions via file loaders. Sourcing rules and bills of distribution determine the movement of materials between organizations in your global enterprise; these organizations include your suppliers and the materials include those items made at the manufacturing organizations.

Sourcing rules and bills of distribution specify date–effective sourcing strategies, combining replenishment sources with source rankings. Users can flexibly assign sourcing rules to individual items, categories, organizations and regions to define the complete supply chain from suppliers to customers.

Rapid Planning can select primary or alternate sources depending on supply constraints to provide the best demand satisfaction dates. If Rapid Planning selects an alternate organization to source an order, then the selection is reported by the exception message “Order Sourced from Alternate Facility”.


3.10.2.15. Supplier Capacity

You can specify time–phased capacity of individual suppliers to specific items in Oracle Purchasing or upload supplier capacity via file loaders. Rapid Planning can allocate planned orders based the constraints of the suppliers. Planned orders are assigned supplier sources in respect to their capacity. Rapid Planning uses the ranking information you specify in sourcing rules and first attempts to source the planned orders with the primary sources. If the capacity to fulfill the demand is not available, alternative sources are used. If the order is sourced from an alternate supplier, then the selection is reported by the exception message “Order Sourced from Alternate Supplier”.

You can specify item-supplier lead times and supplier capacity calendars. Rapid Planning recognizes the item-supplier specific parameters and applies them as sources of supply are evaluated to find supply that meets a demand on time. Users can also enter item-supplier specific order modifiers.

The supplier capacity calendar governs how supplier capacity is accumulated over a period of time. Supplier capacity is only accumulated on the working days according to the supplier capacity calendar. The supplier capacity calendar also governs how the supplier processing time is calculated.

3.10.2.16. Bills of Material and BOM Effectivity

Rapid Planning is integrated with Oracle BOM or you can upload bills of material and routings via file loaders. It supports single-level and multi-level bills of material. Rapid Planning recognizes and recommends substitute components when primary components are delayed or not available. Substitute component selections are reported by the exception message “Planned Order uses Substitute Component”.

If alternate bills of material are specified, then the alternate bill may be recommended if there are supply constraints on the primary bill of material and routing. Alternate bills of material selections are reported by the exception message “Planned Order uses Alternate BOM/Routing”.

Rapid Planning respects BOM effectivity dates. The planning engine will calculate component requirements based on the BOM effectivity date and also considering component effectivity dates. Rapid Planning evaluates the engineering change orders as of their scheduled effective date. You can order material and plan resources that you need for new revisions ahead of time.

3.10.2.17. By-products and Co-products

By-products and co-products specified on the BOM are evaluated by Rapid Planning. New planned orders include by-products and co-products which can be used as supply available on the completion dates. Rapid Planning also uses existing WIP standard and non-standard job by-products and co-products as available supply.

3.10.2.18. Routing Operation and Resource Scheduling

Rapid Planning constrained planning respects resource capacity and schedules new planned orders and existing discrete jobs to avoid resource capacity overloads. You can define routings, resources and resource capacity in Oracle BOM or upload via file loaders.


You can specify simultaneous resources and set the maximum assigned units for each resource requirement to control scheduling results. Rapid Planning respects prior and next operation scheduling controls. Resource efficiency and utilization are used by Rapid Planning resource requirement calculations.

If you can specify alternate resources, Rapid Planning selects alternates and schedules around constraints on primary resources to meet demands on time. Rapid Planning also chooses alternate routings when required because of constraints on the primary BOM and routing. Alternate selections reported with the exception messages “Planned Order uses Alternate Resource” and “Planned Order uses Alternate BOM/Routing”.

Rapid Planning respects routing effectivity dates. Resource requirements are generated using routings which are effective on the start date of the planned order.

Planners can select certain bottleneck resources to perform constrained planning. Other resources are planned in an unconstrained mode using the resource lead time during scheduling. Rapid Planning creates schedules that do not overload the selected bottleneck resources and reports overloads on the non-bottleneck resources. This allows the planner to focus on the critical bottleneck resources.

3.10.2.19. End Item Substitution

Rapid Planning uses end item substitution rules to find acceptable substitute item supplies when the requested item is not available for the demand request date. Substitution is based on user-defined rules that can be effective either in one direction or in both directions; defining a chain of substitution relationships. Customer specific item substitution rules can also be specified which are respected by Rapid Planning when searching for supplies for that customer’s demands. When item substitutes are selected, Rapid Planning alerts the planning with the exception message “Demand Satisfied Using End Item Substitution”.

3.10.2.20. Lead Times and Planning Time Fence

Rapid Planning respects manufacturing and purchasing lead times. Users can set pre-processing, processing and post-processing lead times. Rapid Planning constraint based planning respects these lead times. Rapid Planning respects planning time fences defined at the item organization level which allows the user to freeze the schedule during the initial periods of the plan.

3.10.2.21. Order Modifiers

Rapid Planning includes the user specified order modifiers at the item organization level and creates new planned orders respecting the order modifiers. Order modifiers respected include minimum order size, maximum order size, fixed order quantity, fixed lot multiplier and round order quantity. Additionally, users can specify supplier specific order modifiers which are respected by Rapid Planning when creating new planned orders sourced from the supplier.

3.10.2.22. Safety Stock Lead Time

Rapid Planning considers safety stock lead time that is user controllable at the item organization level. Safety stock lead time is a lead time that you add to the normal lead time of make and buy items. You use it to instruct the planning engine to schedule supplies in advance of the demand due dates that peg to them. This creates an inventory


buffer to protect against fluctuations in lead time, demand (for example, forecast error), and supply (for example, variable supplier lead times and irregular operation yields)

3.10.2.23. Shipping, Receiving and Carrier Calendars

Rapid Planning plans a variety of supply chain activities like manufacturing, inter facility shipments, purchases, and shipment to customers. Each of these activities is controlled by a set of calendars. Manufacturing, supplier, and customer facilities may be able to ship or receive goods on specific days. Rapid Planning schedules each type of supply or demand considering the working and non working days in the appropriate set of calendars.

The shipping calendar indicates the valid working days for shipment activities originating from suppliers and organizations. The planning engine does not recommend a shipment out from those facilities if the date is a non-working day.

The receiving calendar governs the receiving activities at the organizations or customer sites that receive goods. The planning engine allows organizations to receive shipments only on a working day.

The carrier calendar indicates the working and non-working days and times for material that is in transit using different means of transport. For example, certain methods of shipment such as parcel carriers may not work on weekends. This may cause the transit time to be stretched over the weekends.

3.10.2.24. Planner Action: Firm Existing Supplies

Planners can review existing WIP jobs and purchase orders while comparing to the pegged demands. When required, the planner can pull in or push out the existing supply and firm it. Rapid Planning respects the firm flag by not changing the schedule dates and by consuming material and resource capacity before scheduling non-firm supplies. Rapid Planning reports any overload situations caused by firm supplies.

3.10.2.25. Planner Action: Firm Planned Supplies

Planners can review new planned make and buy orders while comparing to the pegged demands. When required, the planner can pull in or push out the new planned orders and selectively firm the planned orders. Rapid Planning respects the firm flag by not changing the schedule dates and by consuming material and resource capacity before scheduling non-firm supplies. Rapid Planning reports any overload situations caused by firm planned orders.

3.10.2.26. Release New Planned Orders and Reschedule Recommendations

Planners can easily release recommendations from Rapid Planning to execution systems. Planners can selectively release planning recommendations or choose to release all recommendations. Planners can adjust recommendation due dates and then release the new planned orders or the reschedule of existing planned orders

New planned make orders are released with an alternate BOM/Routing recommendation. If Rapid Planning selects substitute components and alternate resources, these selections are also be released as part of the make order.


Rapid Planning allows the user to specify the auto-release of planned orders within the release time fence. Users can set the release time as the item organization attribute. Auto-release of planned orders occurs immediately after the Rapid Planning plan processes complete.

Rapid Planning release processes are fully integrated with Oracle Purchasing and Order WIP. The release processes also allow for integration to third party systems.

3.10.2.27. Exceptions

Rapid Planning generates the following 24 exception types, and are displayed within the "Exceptions" view in Rapid Planning.

• Past Due Sales Orders • Late Replenishment for Sales Order • Late Replenishment for Forecast • Demand Quantity Not Satisfied • Resource Overloaded • Exception: Supplier Capacity Overloaded • Items with a Shortage • Items below Safety Stock • Items with Excess Inventory • Past Due Orders • Orders to be rescheduled out • Orders to be cancelled • Orders to be rescheduled in • Order with Insufficient Lead Time • Sales Order/Forecast at Risk due to a resource shortage • Sales Order/Forecast at Risk due to material shortage • Late Supply pegged to Forecast • Late supply pegged to Sales Order • Planned Order uses alternate BOM/Routing • Planned Order uses Substitute Component • Planned Order uses Alternate Resource • Order Sourced from Alternate Facility • Order sourced from Alternate Supplier • Demand Satisfied Using End Item Substitution

Exceptions are generated only when a plan run has completed, and are not regenerated when manual edits are made to a plan.

Users can choose to enable or disable the display of specific exception types, and specify their arrangement within the Exceptions view through a configuration mechanism.

Within an exception type, users can specify search criteria or filters to specify the exceptions that must be displayed. Search criteria can be saved with a user specified name for future use.

From an exception, navigation to other related Rapid Planning views has been provided in context of the exception’s attributes (Item, Org, Resource, etc). Exceptions generated in Rapid Planning can be exported to MS Excel for further analysis.


When Plan Comparison is enabled in Rapid Planning, exceptions for the base plan and compared plan for an exception type are displayed in adjacent tabs. The name of the exception type also has the name of the associated plan to easily identify which plan the listed exceptions belong to.

3.10.2.28. Embedded Analytics

KPI’s/Metrics are displayed in Rapid Planning in a separate “Analytics” view. Rapid Planning can display the following plan metrics:

• Stock Outs (in days) • Fill Rate (%) • Inventory Turns • Safety Stock violations (in days) • Revenue • Gross margin (%) • Manufacturing Cost • Purchasing Cost • On Time Orders (%) • Resource Utilization (%) • Supplier Capacity Utilization (%) • Clear to Build (% of orders) • Clear to Build Component Availability(%) • Ready to Build (%) • Top N Shortage Components (%)

In addition to the above metrics, Rapid Planning can also display different facts (Count, Quantity, Value, etc) for the supported exception types as metrics.

Selection of the metrics that must be displayed, their display levels, associated filter conditions, and their layout within the Analytics view can be configured at a user level.

In a Plan Comparison mode, values from both the base and the compared plans are shown together for easy visibility and comparison.

The Analytics view also enables the comparison of end order satisfaction across two plans within an Order Comparison region. To easily compare end demands planned differently across the base and compared plans, seeded comparison mechanisms (e.g. “Was On Time, Now Late”) are provided. Search capabilities are also provided to restrict the comparison to a user defined selection.

3.10.2.29. Late Demand Diagnosis

Rapid Planning generates, for each late demand, root cause information that can be viewed in a new Constraints view. The view tells the planner what material and resource constraints caused the demand to be satisfied late, as well as an assessment of how severe each constraint is.

For every late demand, Rapid Planning will report the following types of constraints:

• Material Constraint o Lead Time Constraint o Planning Time Fence Constraint


o Date Effectivity Constraint o WIP Window Constraint

• Resource Constraint • Supplier Constraint

These constraints will be reported along all alternate paths: alternate resources on routings, substitute components on bills of material, alternate bills of material and routings, alternate sources on sourcing rules, and end item substitutes. Each constraint will have information such as requested date, requested quantity, available quantity, shortage (both in absolute quantity and percentage terms) so that planners can immediately see what actions to take to resolve each late fulfillment of a demand.

3.10.2.30. Global Forecasting

Global forecasting allows you to define forecasts without the context of a shipment organization. This is done in Oracle Demand Management. Forecasts can have reference to ship-to entities such as customer site and zone. You can choose a ship-to consumption level in Rapid Planning.

You can use sourcing rules to distribute consumed global forecasts to appropriate shipment organizations. Forecast distribution is performed in an unconstrained manner based on the user defined percentages in the sourcing rules. Rapid Planning issues exception messages when a distributed forecast demand at an organization cannot be met on time by supply in that organization.

3.10.2.31. Configure to Order

Rapid Planning supports configure to order environments. Rapid Planning can accept forecasts for assemble to order (ATO) models and pick to order (PTO) models as demand schedules. ATO and PTO forecasts from Oracle Demand Management and E-Business Suite R12 and R11i10 are supported.

Single level and multi-level ATO models are supported by Rapid Planning. Multi-level ATO models include models at lower levels of the BOM structure. Configured to order sales orders consume model forecasts at each level of the multi-level model. Rapid Planning will plan for the unconsumed model, option and option class forecasts as well as planning for the configured items. Supplies are scheduled and created as needed for all lower levels.

You can provide pre-exploded forecast values of your ATO and PTO models and components to Rapid Planning. Configured sales orders consume the model and lower level forecasts. Rapid Planning supports forecast consumption at various levels such as customer, customer site, zone (global forecasts), demand class, and item organization.

Rapid Planning can also optionally explode the forecast for the top level model. Model forecasts are exploded to option, option class and component forecasts within Rapid Planning using the 'Explode Forecast' plan option. After forecast explosion, Rapid Planning will consume and plan supplies for the unconsumed forecast demand at each level.

Multi-level multi-organization models are supported. A multi-organization model is one which contains top level or some lower-level models which are transferred between


organizations. If you have multi-organization models you must use global forecasting for forecast consumption to be correct.

Rapid Planning distributes global forecasts for ATO and PTO models across organizations based on the user-specified sourcing rule percentages. The global forecasts can be consumed at different levels such as Global (Item), Organization, Customer, Customer Site, and Zone.

Rapid Planning plans only consider ATO sales orders after they have been progressed to include a linked configured item. This allows Rapid Planning to schedule these sales orders with all the capabilities provided for standard items - for example, to net existing supplies of pre-configured stock at any supply chain bill of material level.

A forecast for a lower level ATO configuration that will be stocked will be consumed by a sales order for the top level configured model. Rapid Planning will consume the forecast for this specific configuration first. Any remaining demand will then consume the forecast for the associated ATO model.

For procured configurations, Rapid Planning allows you to plan based on the aggregate capacity of the supplier-supplier site to build the base model. A supplier capacity statement for the ATO model is consumed by the ATO items that are created based on this model. KPIs illustrating supplier capacity metrics, as well as exception messages are provided to help you make an informed decision.

3.10.2.32. Default Order Sizing

Rapid Planning provides support for default order sizing to improve scheduling results. Smaller order sizes improve scheduling flexibility which leads to higher fill rates and on time supplies. In the absence of order modifiers, Rapid Planning sizes orders to daily production capacity. When some capacity is consumed on a day, Rapid Planning reduces the order size to fit within the remaining capacity in a day.

Users can override the default order sizing algorithm by specifying a new item-organization attribute called planning unit of work. The user can set planning unit of work to the number of hours for the duration of the maximum order size. For example, set planning unit of work to 8 hours and the resulting new planned orders will not exceed 8 hour shifts in duration.

User can set the planning unit of work to larger than daily capacities and Rapid Planning will create new planned orders that typically span several days up to the specified planning unit of work.

The default order sizing does not override existing item-organization order modifiers. For example, if the fixed order quantity is specified, then all order sizes equal fixed order quantity without regard to the planning unit of work. Default order sizing is only applied to new planned orders and does not affect the quantity of an existing supply.

3.10.2.33. Inventory Reservations

Rapid Planning recognizes on hand inventory reservations to sales orders. The on hand supply that is reserved to a sales order cannot be used for any other demand. Reservations for both full and partial demand quantities are supported. In the case of a partial reservation, Rapid Planning schedules supplies for the unreserved quantity of the sales order.


Rapid Planning generates pegging of on-hand supply to sales orders that matches the reservations recorded in the source transaction system. In the supply and demand window, each sales order demand includes a new field which displays the quantity of on hand inventory that is reserved to the sales order.

3.10.2.34. Clear to Build

A make order (planned make order, WIP job, etc.) is “Clear to Build” if all its component requirements are pegged to on-hand supply.

Rapid Planning provides visibility to the Clear to Build status of Make Orders, both at the individual make order level as well as at aggregate levels through new key performance indicators (KPIs). The Clear to Build status on make orders are visible through new order level attributes: “Clear to Build Status”, “Ready to Build %”, “Clear to Build Date”, and “Clear to Build Component Availability %”. Equivalent KPIs can be configured to view these attributes at aggregate levels.

Rapid Planning also allows user to control allocation of scarce on-hand component supply to make orders by explicitly prioritizing or de-prioritizing specific make orders. This can be achieved through a new Rapid Planning view called the Clear to Build Dashboard. The dashboard allows a user to:

• Search for the make orders for which the user wants the Clear to Build status to be improved;

• Prioritize specific make orders for Clear to Build – this results in on-hand being allocated to these make orders preferentially when the plan is launched next;

• View contentions for selected make orders – contentions are other make orders that share common components; these make orders could potentially contribute to the improvement of the clear to build status of the target orders;

• Selectively de-prioritize certain make orders from allocation of on-hand – these selected orders will be given lower priority when on-hand is allocated to Make Orders in the next plan run;

• View how a specific component is allocated to multiple make orders, and prioritize or de-prioritize make orders for on-hand allocation based on this component allocation view.

3.10.2.35. Rapid Planning – Sales and Operations Planning Integration

Rapid Planning plans will be visible in Demantra Real-time Sales and Operations Planning. The integration between Rapid Planning and Real-time Sales and Operations Planning is similar to the existing Advanced Supply Chain Planning to Real-time Sales and Operations Planning integration. You can export consensus forecast data from Real-time Sales and Operations Planning to Rapid Planning plan. You can read the supply data from a Rapid Planning plan back into Real-time Sales and Operations Planning. This data from the Rapid Planning plan will now be visible in Real-time Sales and Operations Planning worksheets.

3.10.2.36. Rapid Planning – Global Order Promising Integration

Rapid Planning plans can now be used by Global Order Promising (GOP) to promise orders. The supply from this plan is considered by GOP when promising orders if GOP is set up to promise orders against a plan output. If there are a mix of ASCP and Rapid Planning plans that have supplies for an Item/Org, GOP accords the highest preference to supply from a Rapid Planning plan. Rapid Planning – GOP integration allows an


enterprise to react quickly to unforeseen events, by enabling quick integration between planning simulations and the order promising process.

24 by 7 ATP is not enabled against Rapid Planning plans. Also, any inserts that GOP makes into the plan (Sales Orders, Planned Orders, etc.) will not be visible within the Rapid Planning plan itself. Any Rapid Planning plan that is enabled for ATP will not be editable. This avoids inconsistencies between the current output of the Rapid Planning plan and the version against which GOP is promising orders.

3.10.2.37. Order Comparison

In a Plan Comparison mode, Rapid Planning’s Analytics view now has an additional tab that displays “Order Comparison.” This allows users to compare demand satisfaction of sales orders across two plans intelligently. Users can view which demands were planned on time in the base plan, but are delayed in the comparison plan and vice versa, and which demands have increased or decreased their lateness in the comparison plan versus the base plan.

A search region allows users to query up only sales orders of interest – for example, sales orders for specific items, or sales orders at specific organizations.

3.10.2.38. Multi-Planner Collaboration

Rapid Planning allows a user to save changes made to data in Rapid Planning to a simulation set. A user can save a specific record, multiple records within a Rapid Planning view, or changes across multiple Rapid Planning views to a named simulation set through a single click action.

Multiple planners can thus work on simulation copies of a base plan and save the results of their simulation to a common simulation set. When the base plan is launched again with reference to this simulation set, all the user changes will be considered in the next version of the Rapid Planning plan.

3.10.2.39. Functional and Data Security

This enhancement provides Rapid Planning with:

Functional Security

• This is the ability to dictate which functions (Create, Update / Edit, Delete, Launch, Save, Close, Load, Copy, and Release) a responsibility should have access to.

Data Security

• Data access can be controlled at two levels. o Organization: Here, you can assign organizations to a responsibility.

Then, users with that responsibility will have access to (i) all Plans in which the organizations exist and (ii) all items within those organizations.

o Plan: A user creating a plan can mark the Plan as Private or Public. A Public plan is accessible by all responsibilities (and, as a result, by all users) provided they have the necessary Organization level security granted. A Private plan is only accessible by specific users to whom access has been granted (access is granted by the user who created the plan and marked it as Private). In case of Private plans, users will have

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access all items and organizations within that plan. However, the actions the user can take are controlled by the Function Security of the user’s responsibility.

3.11. Oracle Service Parts Planning – New Product


Oracle Service Parts Planning (SPP) brings advanced multi-echelon supply chain planning to a service supply chain consisting of internal warehouses, emergency stocking locations, internal repair depots, external repair vendors, and external new buy vendors.

Oracle SPP is a new product dedicated to the service parts planning domain. It offers an integrated forecasting and replenishment planning workbench, planning logic dedicated to the unique characteristics of the service parts planning domain (such as reverse logistics, multiple part conditions, and part supersession), and seamless integration to Oracle Supply Chain Management and Oracle Service (Spares Management and Depot Repair) applications to support execution of planned replenishment actions, including external and internal repair.

3.11.2. Release 12.1.1

Oracle Service Parts Planning supports the following:

3.11.2.1. Integrated Demand and Supply Planning

By running a single Service Plan, you can regenerate both the forecasts and the replenishment recommendations (procurement, transfer, and repair) for an entire service supply chain.

A service parts planning workbench lets you view and manipulate forecasts as well as transfer, and new buy and repair recommendations and transactions. All demand/supply, exception, item attribute and comments pertaining to a service part are visible in a single screen, creating a very efficient user experience for the planner.

3.11.2.2. Service Parts Planning Workbench

In service environments, it is common for planning responsibility to be divided across planners by item, and for planners to analyze, change, and execute plans on an item by item basis. To support this practice, a new SPP screen shows in a single window the following information about an item:

• Values of key item attributes

• Horizontal supply and demand plan

• Planner comments relating to the item

• Exceptions relating to the item

• Demand history and forecast

The SPP Workbench can display demand and supply information at the level of a single item, or aggregated across multiple revisions of the item’s supersession chain. It can


display demand and supply information at a single location, or aggregated across user-defined groups of locations (inventory organizations).

3.11.2.3. Integration to Spares Management for External Repairs

SPP plans for repair of defective spare parts at external vendors. Movement of defective parts to the repair vendor, repair lead times and yields at the repair vendor, and movement of repaired (good) parts back to an internal warehouse are considered. The repair vendor must be modeled as an inventory organization. Upon release of a recommendation for external repair, integration with Oracle Spares Management automatically creates the repair purchase order to the repair vendor, the internal sales order to move defectives to the repair vendor, and the underlying work orders necessary to progress the repair through the repair vendor. (Management of the work orders is automatic and does not require user intervention.) Tracking of repair progress is done through a workbench in Oracle Spares Management.

3.11.2.4. Integration to Depot Repair for Internal Repairs

SPP plans for repair of defective spare parts at internal repair depots. Movement of defective parts to the repair vendor, repair lead times and yields at the repair vendor, and movement of repaired (good) parts back to an internal warehouse are considered. The repair depot must be modeled as an inventory organization. Upon release of a recommendation for internal repair, integration with Oracle Depot Repair automatically creates the transfer order to move defectives to the internal repair depot, the repair work order at the repair depot, and the transfer order to move the repaired spare parts back to a warehouse. Tracking of repair progress is done through a workbench in Oracle Depot Repair.

3.11.2.5. Support for Part Condition

SPP distinguishes between supplies of a single spare part that are of different conditions: good and defective. This allows SPP to recommend appropriate repairs to satisfy demand for good spare parts.

3.11.2.6. Criticality Matrix

You can group items into various criticalities on the basis of a flexible number of attributes such as cost, order frequency, reliability, and impact of failure. You can then specify forecasting methods and service level targets by criticality.

3.11.2.7. Support for Supersessions

SPP automatically uses supplies of later revisions of an item to satisfy demand for earlier revisions of the item. Forecasts are automatically created for the latest item revision in a supersession chain on the basis of the combined histories of the latest item revision and all previous item revisions. Revisions are defined via supersession item relationships in either Oracle Inventory or Oracle Spares Management.

3.11.2.8. Returns Forecasts

Forecasts of returns of defectives from the field are recognized as supply during the planning process. Recommendations for repairs will not exceed the forecasted and available supply of defective spare parts.


3.11.2.9. Minimize New Buys

SPP exhausts on-hand supplies of substitutable item revisions and options for repair of defective supplies before recommending, as a last resort, purchase of new spare parts to satisfy spares demand.

3.11.2.10. Life Time Buys

When a service part is obsoleted in advance of the end of the useful life of the products that require it for service, a last or 'life time buy' must be undertaken. SPP recognizes life time buy events as defined in the item attribute simulation set and recommends appropriate 'life time buys' that fulfill demand anticipated to fall between the life time buy date and the end of life date. (The latter date may be well beyond the end of the planning horizon.)

3.11.2.11. Planner Work Lists

SPP can generate a personal work list for each planner that dynamically lists items controlled by the planner that have important exceptions (for example, late replenishments where the number of days late is greater than 3) and those that have key recommendations (for example, new buy orders that need to be released within the next 5 days). The type and severity of exceptions that qualify items for the work list and the type of recommendations that qualify for the work list can be specified by the planner. The work list shows the most important to-dos (items to replan, recommendations to release) that each planner must take care of at any given time.

3.11.2.12. Integration with Collaborative Planning

SPP supports the publishing of new buy order forecasts to new buy suppliers and repair order forecasts to external repair suppliers. Suppliers can view and respond to these order forecasts through Collaborative Planning (CP). External repair suppliers can also view in CP forecasts of defective shipments to their facilities as planned in SPP. SPP can receive supply commits uploaded to CP from new buy suppliers and trigger exception messages when those commit levels are exceeded.

3.11.2.13. Supersession Chain-Specific Replanning

When a planner is working on a service part in the planner workbench, he or she can initiate a quick replan of just the supersession chain involving the part on display. This allows the planner to perform adjustments such as expediting repair or purchase orders, or changing the forecast either manually or by switching statistical forecasting methods, then quickly recalibrate the supply / demand balance of the part being worked. The replan can include forecasting and replenishment planning, or just one of those. The planner's replanning action will not affect the planning results of any other part in other supersession chains. Multiple planners can therefore work concurrently on the same SPP plan, each on their own parts, without impacting each other's work.

3.11.2.14. Execution Net Change Planning

Service parts planning environments are characterized by high part and location counts. Scalability of planning calculations is a primary concern. On the functional side, SPP enhances scalability by planning parts only when necessary, and while leaving the pre-existing planning results of other parts intact. If the "Net Change" launch option of SPP toggled to Yes, SPP will only generate fresh plan results for new parts or those parts that


have experienced net changes in demand/supply, item attributes, supersession or repair to relationships, or supplier capacity; it will overlay those plan results on top of pre-existing plan results for other items. This feature operates in conjunction with net change collections.

3.11.3. Release 12.1.2

3.11.3.1. Multi-process Inline Forecasting

The performance of Inline Forecasting in Oracle Service Parts Planning (SPP) has been significantly enhanced through the introduction of a new profile option "MSO: Number of processes for Inline Forecast".

While previously a single 'Memory Based Forecaster' process was launched to generate a forecast for all items in the plan, you can now launch multiple processes, so that forecasts for different item-chains are generated in parallel. This profile determines the number of such processes that are launched in parallel for forecasting.

3.11.3.2. Intermittent Demand Flag

Whether the history data for an item is intermittent or not determines:

• the forecast methods that Oracle Service Parts Planning (SPP) employs to generate a 'Blended' (Bayesian weighted average) forecast, and

• the safety stock calculation method used by Oracle Inventory Optimization (IO). IO assumes Poisson-distributed demand variability for intermittent demands, normally-distributed demand variability for non-intermittent demands.

Previously the SPP Forecast Rule screen had an option to specify whether the history data was intermittent or not. This approach this had two inherent issues: (i) the forecast rule is independent of item and (ii) non-SPP users of Oracle Inventory Optimization needed to set up SPP Forecast Rules in order to trigger IO's intermittent demand calculations.

Release 12.1.2 has an enhanced Item Attribute Mass Maintenance (IMM) form, with a new item attribute 'Intermittent Demand' added. This attribute will be used to specify whether the history pattern is intermittent or not, and will be referred to by the SPP forecasting engine, and by IO. This will be available both on the Item-Organization and Item-Zone tab of the IMM. The options on the Forecast Rule screen to specify whether history is intermittent or not have been removed.

3.11.3.3. Planner Worklist Enhancement

Oracle Service Parts Planning already had a 'Planner Worklist' that could be set up for each planner so that it dynamically lists important exceptions / key recommendations on his items. This shows the most important to-dos that each planner must take care of at any given time.

The Planner Worklist has been further enhanced in Oracle Service Parts Planning 12.1.2. The grouping of exceptions and recommendations has been rationalized so that the results are presented in a more concise manner, and it is easier to drill down from this prioritized list of tasks to details regarding each.


3.11.4. Release 12.1.3

3.11.4.1. Re-order Point-based Parts Planning

Reorder point based planning is a widely adopted method of planning replenishments for service parts. It uses demand forecasts and item lead times to decide when to place a new order in order to avoid dipping into safety stock. Orders are usually created for the economic order quantity, in order to strike a balance between purchasing and carrying costs.

Oracle Service Parts Planning 12.1.3 has been enhanced to support Re-order point based planning. SPP computes the safety stock target for a part based on mean absolute deviation (for parts with regular demand) or assuming a Poisson distribution (for parts with intermittent demand), or reads in safety stock targets from other sources (like Inventory Optimization). It then dynamically determines when to place an order, depending on this safety stock target and future demand.

SPP also computes the Economic Order Quantity using the standard formula, so that new orders are placed for this quantity. The user also has the option to override the system computed values. The values of safety stock and EOQ can be recalculated during a planning run, or they can be retained at their existing values.

3.11.4.2. Import into a Simulation Set

The Simulation Set in SPP is used by planners for mass maintenance of data. This is however difficult to use when the planner has to manually enter or edit values for each attribute in the forms UI.

SPP 12.1.3 has been enhanced to support a mass upload of item attribute values into the simulation set. A standard format spreadsheet template is provided as part of legacy collections flat file loads. The planner can use this template to enter / edit / delete attribute values, and then upload the spreadsheet file to mass update the values for the respective attributes on the items.

The Planner Workbench (Supply Demand Analysis) screen has also been enhanced to enable update of item attributes that will then be considered in an online replan.

Demand Supply

Time

Safety Stock

Re-order Quantity

Quantity

PAB Profile


3.11.4.3. Integration with Advanced Supply Chain Planning

An OEM manufacturing products often manufactures spare parts for them too. Typically the OEM would have a distinct service supply chain, where defective products are returned and repaired. In case there is not sufficient supply of defective parts (that can be repaired) in the service supply chain, new parts may have to be manufactured. Thus the manufacturing facility that manufactures the parts will have two sets of demands – one coming from the manufacturing supply chain, and the second coming from the service supply chain.

Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) plans for the manufacturing supply chain and currently handles the first stream of demand. ASCP is now integrated with Oracle Service Parts Planning (SPP) which plans for the service supply chain. Thus SPP would take in demand from the Service supply chain and try to meet these demands through repair of defective parts. In case all demands cannot be met in this manner, SPP can source parts from the manufacturing supply chain. This ‘demand’ for spare parts from SPP is read in by ASCP (by virtue of the SPP plan being a demand schedule in the ASCP plan). ASCP then plans the manufacture.

3.11.4.4. Integration with APCC - Service Parts Planner Dashboard

A new Service Parts Planner dashboard is now available in Advanced Planning Command Center. Service Parts Plans can be archived and published to Advanced Planning Command Center. The archived versions can then be viewed in reports and dashboards.

The Service Parts Planner dashboard is structured to address the typical questions that a parts planner would have and includes a number of service-specific measures and KPIs, such as repairs versus new buys, internal versus external repairs, service contracts performance.

The SPP dashboard has five pages: the first, a Plan Health summary, summarizes demand and supply, exceptions, and service agreements.

The Demand and Supply page enables the planner to start with an overall view of demand satisfaction in the service supply chain, and drill down all the way into the SPP planner workbench.

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The Exceptions page of the Service Parts Planner dashboard highlights key exceptions in the service parts plan and enables the planner to investigate their causes.

The Service Level Agreement Analysis page is meant for evaluating service contracts. The planner can see compliance to service contracts, and review costs, revenues, profitability and achieved versus target safety stocks. The reports on this page are based on Inventory Optimization plans.

Finally the Historical Performance page gives the planner a picture of how the plan is tracking against actuals. The planner can compare how actuals for measures such as shipments and returns, compare against SPP plan output.

3.12. Oracle Strategic Network Optimization

3.12.1. Release 12.1.1

3.12.1.1. Supply Chain Risk Management

Due to the dynamic nature of the global business environment, companies are searching for ways to improve their supply chains in order to absorb disruptions that occur unexpectedly. While providing other substantial benefits, Just-in-time, and Lean Manufacturing initiatives have hindered many business's ability to absorb the impact of unexpected events. Slack in the supply chain - usually in the form of inventory - is no longer an acceptable hedging strategy and a sudden change such as a missed supply, can have an immediate impact on a companies' operations. As an example, recent hurricanes have proved disastrous and exposed many weaknesses and companies' existing supply chain. Less sensational events, such as an unexpected line shutdown can also have a material impact to the business.

The ability to run simulations for these unexpected events is necessary for companies to manage risk and these capabilities are now available in Strategic Network Optimization. While most advanced planning software packages have simulation capabilities, considering the unexpected nature of an event is absent. As an example, the simulation of an unexpected plant shutdown in the future will trigger inventory pre-build in anticipation of this event in most software packages. Since this event occurs unexpectedly, this is not a realistic hedging strategy. Strategic Network Optimization will simulate the surprise nature of this event and will present realistic options should such and event occur. These simulations can also be run proactively to determine the potential exposure, or risk, that your company faces.

The following enhancement will allow planners to analyze and mitigate risk by:

The Ability to consider unplanned, and planned events and it’s impact on the supply chain

Easily compare scenarios using various Key Performance Indicators

Ability to consider multiple demand series and safety stock plans

Vital to this enhancement is the concept of unplanned events. In order to simulate the unpredictable nature of such events, the element of surprise needs to be reflected in the solution. For example, if a plant is unexpectedly shut down due to a natural disaster the


solver should not pre-build inventory in anticipation of this event. This requirement will be a key differentiator for the Strategic Network Optimization and strengthen its position in the marketplace as the leader in Supply Chain Risk Management decision support systems.

3.12.1.2. Alerts

Alerts are used to assist the planner with identifying and resolving exceptions after solving the model. The current mechanism to view and manage alerts in SNO is by using the Over and Under User Sets. While this is useful, the generic Over/Under categorization makes it difficult for users to quickly identify exceptions of a certain type. Reports (Smart graphs) are typically created to supplement the Sets and present the information in a more useful format. Reports require set up beforehand and multiple reports are needed to identify exceptions of different types.

Introducing an alert framework in SNO alleviates the need to use both Sets and reports to manage and review exceptions in the model. It will also provide a familiar alert workflow that is typical in many planning applications. Because of it flexibility, SNO is often used to solve non-traditional supply chain problems. This enhancement focuses on the traditional strategic and tactical manufacturing & distribution use of the application. Consideration for a more flexible framework to support non-traditional uses will be considered in the future.

Alerts are categorized based on the business area. Within each category, the type of alert violation will be identified. This provides the planner with the ability to quickly identify and focus on the area of interest. The ability to drill-down and easily navigate to the node or arc of interest is also an important requirement that is addressed.

Alerts will provide the following benefits:

Alerts provide an immediate visual representation of exceptions, which are faster and more informative than using sets to identify exception.

You can drill-down to the exact location of the exception within a node or arc.

Alert categorization is more specific than Over and Under User Sets categorization.

Little set up is required to use alerts.


This image shows the new Alerts area at the bottom of the Strategic Network Optimization main user interface:

The number and type of alerts is displayed in the Model Workspace area. In the Model Workspace tree, at the root level of Alerts, the number of alerts is displayed in brackets and the word Alerts is displayed in bold font. If no exceptions are found in the model, Alerts has no number in brackets next to it and the font is not bolded. In the example above, total of (68) exceptions were found when the model was solved.

Within Alerts, there are six different alert categories. The number of exception found within each type of alert is displayed next to the alert category in the Model Workspace area. In the example above, (42) Demand alerts, (22) Inventory alerts, and (4) Transportation alerts were found for a total of (68). Within each alert category, there are several specific types of exceptions. If an exception is found, a red exclamation mark is displayed next to the exception type and if no exceptions are found, a green checkmark is displayed next to the exception type, as seen in the example above.

The Alerts section can be displayed across the bottom of the main user interface, as seen in the example above. This section can be shown, expanded, or collapsed, using the up and down arrows at the top of the section. If you double-click an Alerts folder in the Model Workspace tree, the Alerts section at the bottom of the main user interface expands. Single-clicking on an item in the Alerts section of the Model Workspace tree displays the alert in the Alerts section at the bottom of the main user interface. The six tabs; Demand, Inventory, Manufacturing, Transportation, Supply, and Other reflect the alerts results and match the Alerts section in the Model Workspace tree.

When using alerts, each node or arc that you want to be alerted about is assigned an alert category. To assign an alert category, a new Category drop-down list was added to nodes and arcs:


3.12.1.3. Key Performance Indicators

After running a scenario, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help you make detailed scenario comparisons. They provide you with graphical representation of various metrics in a model. KPIs can show you which scenario is most efficient at filling demand, minimizing inventory costs, or providing the highest percentage of machine utilization. Costs are categorized based on the types of costs in the nodes and arcs and are summed across the whole planning horizon, not by period. KPIs are only visible in Key Performance Indicators view.

An example of the Key Performance Indicators View

Strategic Network Optimization has nine different KPIs:

Total Cost - The sum of all costs in the model.

Transportation Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where Category is set to Transportation.

Production Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where Category is set to Manufacturing.

Supply Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where Category is set to Supply.

Inventory Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where Category is set to Inventory.


Other Cost - The sum of all costs for any node or arc in the model where Category is null.

Labor Utilization % - Labor utilization expressed as a percentage.

Machine Utilization % - Machine utilization expressed as a percentage.

Demand Fill Rate % - Demand Fill Rate expressed as a percentage.

By default, Key Performance Indicator data is displayed in bar chart format. However, the data can also be displayed in pie chart format or polar format by clicking the Pie or Polar tabs. A polar chart displays points in a graph based on data in the scenario. An example of a polar chart can be seen here below:

=

Polar chart

By default, each scenario defined in the Model Workspace appears in the Key Performance Indicators view. However, you can use the KPI Selection Dialog to choose which key performance indicators scenarios are displayed.

KPI Selection Dialog


The concept of scenarios was introduced in previous versions of Strategic Network Optimization. However, scenarios are now created and run from the Model Workspace tree as seen below:

Scenarios & Events in the Model Workspace Tree

The concept of events is new to this version of Strategic Network Optimization. Events are individual occurrences which impact the supply chain. Events are created and then added to scenarios. They specify the find and replace functions which are performed within the model. Each scenario should have at least one event assigned to it. If you run a scenario with no events in it, the model baseline solves. Several events can be added to the same scenario. There are two kinds of events:

Unplanned Planned

Unplanned events have been added to support Supply Chain Risk Management, they are complete surprises. They are used when there is no warning that the event will occur. A sudden change such as a missed supply can have an immediate impact on a company’s operations. Unplanned events allow you to incorporate the concept of surprise into your model’s solution. Examples of unplanned events which can massively interrupt supply chain operations include natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

Planned events are not surprises and there is at least some react time involved. With this advance warning, there is at least some time to make other supply arrangements and activate contingency plans. Examples of planned events include seasonal supply chain interruptions, anticipated shortages, and increases in demand caused by promotions.

3.12.1.4. Usability Enhancements

The investment in usability continues with this release. In addition to the Alerts, and KPI view the following enhancements have been incorporated to improve the overall user experience:

Improved Find and Replace

Find, Replace, and Find Export are essential tools required by consultants, pre-sales, and customers. The purpose for initiating any of these utilities are many – from model


creation, navigation, and data editing to name a few. While each function serves a distinct purpose, there is some overlap and the fact that they each have similar, yet different dialogs is confusing. The usability suffers further as the number of modal dialogs that pop up can be many. For example, a simple Find query with an ensuing replace opens up to seven dialog boxes which must than be closed. This enhancement provides the following in SNO:

Combined dialog boxes for Find, Replace, and Find Export Ability to access the dialog boxes with shortcuts versus the multi-nested menus Improved usability with a more intuitive graphical user interface

Quick access to common functions in the toolbar

Commonly used functions have been added to the toolbar for easy access. These include:

Find & Replace Hide Nodes Hide Arcs Fat Arcs Align Nodes in Columns Align Nodes in Rows Select Adjacent nodes Show/hide map legend

Improved Map Legend

The map legend has been improved to provide the ability to move the legend outside of the map view to prevent the legend from covering up key areas of the map. The ability to specify a shape and color has also been added in this release.

Overall Look and Feel

Node icons have replaced the dated node symbols to make the nodes easier to identify. The node color has also been changed to match the color of the application and block images have been updated in the sample models.


3.12.2. Release 12.1.2

3.12.2.1. Aggregate Assignment Set and Lane Definition When setting up a Strategic Plan, assignment sets and lanes are required to be defined for each item that needs to be considered in a plan. For assignment sets the number of item-organization combinations can potentially be very large since many of the aggregate assignment levels are currently not supported. Similarly, when setting up lanes from organization to customers each individual lane needs to be defined for every item-organization-customer site-ship method combination. The setup for this can become very tedious and error prone. A simple example will illustrate the current challenge. Number of customer sites =100 Average Number of DC’s per customer site=2 Number of ship methods (rail, truck)=2 For this small supply chain 2 x 100 x 2 = 400 individual lanes would need to be entered. The purpose of this enhancement is to ease the set-up required when defining strategic plans. This is achieved by:

Support all available assignment type levels for input assignment sets. Support for specificity rules to allow for defaulting. For example, a sourcing rule at

the item-organization level will override a previously defined assignment at the category-organization level.

Support lane definition for regions or zones This enhancement will ensure consistency with the other planning products and greatly improve usability. This will also decrease the number of initial setup problems since the most common problem is missing one of the many assignments or lanes that need to be defined.


3.12.3. Release 12.1.3

There are no new enhancements in Oracle Strategic Network Optimization in Release 12.1.3.