Know your planning consolidation options to avoid excess transactions and overspending #D365 #MSDyn365 #microsoftdynamics

One of the many things I often see overlooked is companies not aligning their planning options with the Supply and Operations goals. For example, if freeing up cash flow is your main priority, you may need to reconsider your stocking levels, which could have an impact on delivery performance to your customers. So what I want to talk about today is various options you have in Master planning to help you consolidate orders based on various criteria. These parameters could help drive down excess transportation or freight costs, manage less orders in the system, or group orders for production efficiencies by minimizing setup time.

The first settings we will look at are the base parameters in Master planning that can default how planned orders for the same item can be grouped automatically during the firming process.

As shown above, you can group items by vendor, for example. This means that if you firm multiple planned purchase orders for items purchased from the same vendor, they will be consolidated and shown as multiple lines on the same Purchase order rather than create unique POs for each line. You can also group by Buyer group or Purchase agreements. When grouping parameters are used, you also have the ability to enable the additional parameters to the right side of that form that can break up consolidation based on date ranges. For example, we may only want to consolidate POs by vendor if the delivery dates (based on lead times) fall within the same month. This gives you real flexibility in firming.

Now that we discussed the defaults, it is also important to know that those same grouping parameters can be overridden or applied at the time of firming the planned orders as well. If you select multiple orders for firming and then click the Firm button, you will be presented with a prompt where those parameters can be edited.

Now we’ll take a look at a few other options that come into play prior to firming. First, there is a specific Coverage group type that can be setup to consolidate demand over a period of time. What this means is that I may have demand for the same item all coming from different sources. I may not want to buy or make those items in a 1:1 relation with each source of demand. So if I sell milk, and I have 10 sales orders from customers who all need milk, I may want to buy or make the entire quantity of all sales orders at once because it may be more efficient, less cost, etc. So a Period based coverage group will allow you to define the number of days to group into a single planned order. I.e. If I have many orders that all have ship dates within 20 days of each other, group those into one planned order. Demand for the next 20 day bucket gets consolidated into another planned order, and so on.

Outside of automatic grouping through the coverage group or firming parameters, you also have other options for manual consolidation. One example of this is the Group button that can be used after planned orders are created, prior to firming them. I may have multiple lines for the same item and decide I want to combine those lines into one line for the total sum quantity. By selecting each line then clicking the “Group” button from the planned orders form, I can do exactly that.

After clicking “Group”, you will get a prompt confirming that you are grouping multiple orders into one.

Once grouped, you will see that one planned order now remains with the sum quantities of all group planned orders now showing on that one planned order:

And finally, one other option is to take a planned purchase order and firm it to be added to an existing Purchase order. This is really useful to avoid sending excess POs, especially if the existing order has not be confirmed or sent to the vendor yet and you want to maintain and be invoiced for a single order number. This option exists in the planned order form itself by going to the Planned supply tab:

As you can see, D365FO/SCM has a variety of options to help your company achieve efficiencies by combining orders and planned orders for the purpose of reducing the financial burdens or process inefficiencies that could be caused by leaving and processing them as separate transactions.