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Microsoft is rolling out a new master planning service as a part of the D365 2020 Wave 1 release. Planning Optimization helps companies manage their master planning executions, which provides planning of orders for raw materials, manufacturing orders, and capacity planning. This new service replaces the existing Master Planning night batch process with best in class performance for Level 2 Tier with high scalability.
Companies familiar with Master Planning know the existing process can take significant time and resources to run, especially when dealing with large-scale quantities of products. In Wave 1, users should be able to look forward to Planning Optimization cutting the service time to minutes, instead of hours, while reducing overhead placed on server resources.
Planning Optimization parameter is set once. Master planning jobs will also leverage the planning optimization service. There will be minimal end-user impact and the user experience is unchanged in how the Master Planning process functions.
Key notables for the current release include:
- Distribution Requirements Planning: In the first release, only demand requirements against your supply chain are available. Any production-based requirements are converted to a planned purchase message. Full MRP capability is on the roadmap scheduled for October 2020.
- Intercompany Planning: Not currently available with the initial release.
- On-premise Instances: This service is currently only available for cloud implementations. In a future release, on-premise instance will have the ability to call to the available cloud service.
Microsoft’s planned roll out will start with purchase demand requirements only, with production requirements to follow in subsequent updates.
Planning Optimization Fit Analysis Tool
Before you dive in and start using the new features, we recommend reviewing the functionality. (link to overview). Then, use Microsoft’s Fit Analysis tools to check your set-ups.
Based on our review of Planning Optimization, here are our adoption recommendations.
DRP Only: If your company has distribution requirement planning only, then you are a good candidate to for early adoption. Run the fit analysis in a minimum Tier 2 test environment to determine the viability to your live system.
Long Batch Run Time: For companies with long batch run times under DRP requirements, leveraging planning optimization service will significantly reduce the run time and server overhead.
MRP Requirements: If your company has full MRP requirements, you will benefit from an early review of planning optimization to plan for the transition later when MRP is available as a general release. Early review will give an insight into the reduced batch run time benefits, as well as understanding from the fit analysis if there are any foreseeable issues with your Master Planning setup. This will give you time to address any issues ahead of a full implementation.
Planning Optimization Availability
The DRP version is available for public preview. For customers with DRP requirements only, the general availability will follow the public preview. Public preview of the bill of material and production scheduling will fall into the Fall 2020 timeline.
According to Microsoft, the content and the functionality are subject to change. For more information:
Planning Optimization Overview
Getting Started: Planning Optimization
Read about Embedding Web Apps in D365 , another new feature in the 2020 Wave 1 release.
