Master Scheduling Available to Promise

Forecast

A forecast is the expected consumption of a part or group of parts as expressed in quantity or monetary value. The forecast is often based on historical results, known market activities, knowledge about new products, local market variations, and experience. Different business areas can store their own forecasts. Master scheduling (MS) and project master scheduling are based on the forecast you enter and the actual backlog of orders. Based on this information, they create a master schedule or a project master schedule, i.e. a manufacturing plan or a purchasing plan. MS means matching your company's sales forecast to the company's available resources and capacity in order to balance supply and demand.

Forecast consumption is the process of decrementing forecast based on the registration of actual orders. The essence of forecast consumption is that forecast, together with actual demand, forms a blended picture of the total demand over the planning horizon. You can also say that actual demand consumes forecast in the forecast consumption process.

When an actual order is received, the system subtracts it from the forecast in the period the order is scheduled to ship. You can choose to consume forecast in the period corresponding to the customer need date or in the original quoted shipment date. If there is no forecast remaining for the period, the system can consume forecast in earlier or later time periods. When a customer order line is booked or changed, a check can be made against the unconsumed forecast to determine whether the order line can be fulfilled or not. This process is further described in About Available to Promise.

One of the most important aspects of customer order management is order promising.

IFS Cloud offers different tools for customer order promising suitable for different business scenarios.

It’s not recommended to use more than one order promising tool for the same part at the same time.

General about Master Scheduling Available to Promise

Master Scheduling is a tool for turning forecasts into production plans. Based on registered forecasts supply proposals are created taking lot sizing and lead times into consideration. When actual demands come in, they are netted/consumed against the forecasts. This demand/supply situation is used for the available to promise process.

In general, The ATP calculation can be performed in two different ways

Important Details for MS ATP

The ATP function considers various parameters and their settings

Online Consumption (Supply and Demand Controls on Inventory Part)

This is the main switch that turns on the MS ATP functionality and also make demands get updated instantly when saving customer order/quotation lines

Promise Method

Defines if available quantity is evaluated against unconsumed supply or unconsumed forecast. Possible values are

Forecast By

Defines if ATP should also cover customer dimension based availability and which dimension that will be used for aggregation per time period. Possible values are

ATP Allocation Period Unit

When Forecast By <> Part, this setting will control for which time period expected plannable quantity will be aggregated. Possible values are

ATP Allocation Method

When Forecast By <> Part, this setting will control how the allocation of expected plannable quantity will be performed. Possible values are

Unallocated Supply Distribution

When Forecast By <> Part this setting will control how the allocation of non-specifically defined customer dimensions will be allowed to use. Possible values are

Registering a Customer Order Line or a Sales Quotation Line

For online consumption to take place, the Online Consumption option for the inventory part must be enabled, and the part you select must be a MS handled part with a forecast. In addition, for sales quotation lines, you must enable the Release for Planning option, on the sales quotation line.

The online consumption happens:

Online Consumption means that forecasts are consumed instantly when any of above events happen. This is to make sure the ATP check is performed on latest updated information.

Forecast Consumption is further described in About Forecast and Forecast Consumption

The Available to Promise (ATP) functionality is dependent on the Promised Method in the MS Level 1 Part page. The promised method can be either Available to Promise or Unconsumed Forecast.

- You are not restricted by the Demand Time Fence (DTF), i.e. you can enter or change lines within the DTF.