Planning By Plant

If you have more than one plant, you can decide whether you should plan production for each plant separately or plan across plants.  In general, you will plan separately if none of the plants share inventory.  You will use cross-planning if one plant uses an item that is produced in another plant.  These two situations are shown in the following table.

        Multi-plant Planning Options

Note that in the single-plant planning example, both plant 1 and plant 2 produce part A.  However, single-plant planning is appropriate because the two plants do not share inventory--both plants purchase part B as required to meet their own needs.  There is no need for transfer orders between the plants to communicate replenishment activity.

When cross-planning is used, Master Scheduling and Requirements Planning:

·      Calculate requirements at the receiving plant.

·      Create time-phased transfer requisitions to supply the part from the producing plant.

·      Include the transfer requisitions in the total demand for the part at the producing plant.  Thus, production will be planned to meet requirements at the receiving plant.

For more information, see the Master Scheduling User Manual or the Requirements Planning User Manual.