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Master Planning with Product Variants

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Posted on by samwardill

Does anyone have any experience of Master Planning with Product Variants?

Our products are set up with variants. We make safety helmets & caps which are sold both in their generic form and configured with a pad printed logo (or embroidery for caps). I think we need to run MRP at the generic level for the mid term horizon and at the configured level in the short term (for pad printing / embroidery).

The generic helmets / caps are configured to order so I imagine we may not even need to run MRP at the configured level if we treat the configuration of the products as a make to order process.

Our implementation partner didn't really understand planning so they didn't really attempt to get this working properly. I am trying to pick up the pieces and get it working.

It feels a bit like Product Variants might have been a legacy Dynamics AX solution which might dwindle within D365. One option for us is to just abandon Product Variants and manage the hierarchy solely within the master data attributes and BoMs / Formulas. I'd appreciate any viewpoints on this idea too.

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Danny Bilodeau 4,685 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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RE: Master Planning with Product Variants

Excellent! Good luck!

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samwardill 40 on at

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RE: Master Planning with Product Variants

In our case the variants are all made from one sub assembly (a generic helmet). I just need to ensure that production of the variant consumes the forecast of the generic helmet. That should be easy enough .

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Danny Bilodeau 4,685 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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RE: Master Planning with Product Variants

Hello again Sam,

There was a new feature added in 2012R3 that changed a setup on the Master Plan that allows for consumption to be based on "transactions" which means any demand (sales order, production order) is consumming the forecast for that component. That was meant to address the requirement you describe: a need to plan ahead to purchase components to manufacture configured items before knowing which configuration would need to be made.

Here is an article on the topic: https://www.axug.com/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=e271bf52-6d91-4c01-a0d6-58aaba3109b4 (look at page 9 for dependant or independant demand)

Here is the announcement explaining the purpose of that feature and its use with Demand Forecasting (feature is still in D365F&O): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamicsax-2012/appuser-itpro/what-s-new-master-planning-features (image below is extract from that announcement)

That is the theory, now how to put it to put it into practice? You "basically" have to explode your standard variant sales forecast to obtain forecast for sub-components and then use that forecast for planning. If you focus your search on these few key words and run some tests you will be able to figure it out.

Here is the relevant parameter on the Master Plan:

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samwardill 40 on at

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RE: Master Planning with Product Variants

In a word . Yes. This would be easy to do without variants but, the way our variants have been set up makes this impractical

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Danny Bilodeau 4,685 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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RE: Master Planning with Product Variants

Hi Sam,

Not to disappoint but variants will not dwindle with D365, quite the contrary new product dimensions are being added.

Is it that you want to use forecast using a generic variant (long term) to explode and purchase the material and consumed that forecast when sales are actually realised?

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Aparisi82 2,180 on at

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RE: Master Planning with Product Variants

It is very diffucult to reply to your post , this requires a deep understanding of your requirements , data structure and an expert Functional Consultant can support you on this process

The advice is to narrow down what you intend to plan first having a cristal clear understanding of the formula/bom structure and what you want the MRP to plan , what horizon , what orders you want the system to generate and so on.

If you ask about using variants for MRP , D365 and previous version are not great as for some configuration you can specify per variants ( such as SS) but for others you cannot like MOQ, multiple and this confuses a lot of customers.

Attributes are not great either as you cannot really do anything with that and can be used only for reporting purposes.

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WillWU 22,359 on at

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RE: Master Planning with Product Variants

Hi partner,

Please check this document:

docs.microsoft.com/.../product-mapping

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