MRP: Scope of Planning

[Former Member]

When rolling out your MRP planning strategy for your company, one thing to keep in mind is how each plant will execute MRP based upon the available settings.  One of the options is to use the scope of planning configuration to string together multiple plants or MRP areas for the planning run.  This feature can simplify your planning job if all plants or MRP Areas use the exact same settings. As company’s roll out their global template, it is an important up front consideration to include in your configuration profile.  The example below shows how one would configure the scope of planning.

So what are the benefits to using this configuration? 

• The primary benefit is obviously to consolidate planning runs for ease of managing large enterprises many plants or MRP areas.  This makes the long term management of the planning run easier for your support team.

Is there a drawback to also consider? 

• The main drawback is when plants or MRP Areas need to have MRP settings that differ from the others, thus the scope of planning will not be as useful for planning run consolidation.

What other considerations need to be addressed?

• When using the scope of planning, you must also  use parallel processing.

The scope of planning functionality can be a very helpful tool in your MRP planning runs as long as you know the benefits, drawbacks, and considerations required to implement it properly.  This simple explanation of this functionality can be used to jump start your blueprinting sessions.