Upgrading Your Built-in Master Planning to the New Planning Optimization Service in D365 Supply Chain Management
January 25, 2022
By: Peter Phelan
If you’re in manufacturing and have heard all the buzz about Microsoft’s new Planning Optimization service that can enhance your Master Planning engine, then you know it’s a big deal. Full planning features and functionality still have a way to go before the trusted built-in D365 Master Planning engine will step aside for manufacturers, but Microsoft has indicated that most planning features for manufacturing will be available by October 2022. This is close enough to consider and prepare for the change now.
The Planning Optimization service is a Microsoft cloud-hosted master planning engine designed to process large amounts of transactions for a large number of products. It will drastically reduce the calculation time as well as unload the burden of the processing from your production environment. This results in a faster user experience as well as the ability to see results of new and changed demands in minutes rather than waiting overnight to see the planning impact. In today’s age of next-day delivery, waiting overnight to plan your orders is no longer a path for industry leaders. Microsoft accomplishes this improved speed by having the planning engine on a separate dedicated service that can process your transactions constantly, without waiting for your daily batch job to process all the day’s transactions.
Planning Optimization is an Add-in for D365 Supply Chain Management and it will need to be installed from your LCS Project, on tier-2 or higher environments. No additional licensing is required. You will also need the Microsoft Power Platform integration setup. After installation, a new Planning Optimization parameters group will appear in the Master Planning setup module.
Simply turn on the Use Planning Optimization switch to leverage the new service. Keep in mind that at this time some of the parameters available in the built-in Master planning are either not available (Positive days, Freeze time fences) or are pre-set (use Dynamic negative days, fulfillment is Today’s date + procurement lead time) in Planning Optimization. These changes may impact your future planning results and enabling the new service will need preparation and adoption of these new settings beforehand.
One of the long sought after features in Master planning is the ability to plan using a Priority-based method rather than a requirement date. Planning Optimization brings this new capability to D365 using the Planning priority rank settings. These ranks can be defaulted on your Demand Forecast, Sales order, Purchase order, Transfer order and planned order lines. The priority value is dynamically calculated during planning using methods that are selectable on the Coverage groups to match your inventory needs but can be overridden by a user on the orders as needed. Both the Released Products and Coverage groups can be set to use Priority-based planning.
Microsoft’s Planning Optimization service is faster, smarter, and included with your D365 licence. If you need help moving your Master planning to the next level, connect with Strabo Partners to help guide you through it.
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