D365 | Good-Bye Master Planning | The Magic of Planning Optimization | Part 1

Hello Everyone!

Hope you all are doing great!

Let's say the last goodbye to Master Planning, it's time to showcase the magic of "Planning optimization."

Abstract: One of my recent assignments is to perform the As-Is analysis for the Pharmaceutical industry. The client is operating multiple legal entities, multiple sites and each site has its own vendor to deliver the goods for a specific category of drugs. The business process owners cannot afford to run the master planning for all the items in one go as it will take some good time to get the results. They are suffering from the master planning batch jobs, it's taking hours and hours even to run the master plan for one vendor who is responsible for delivering them a specific group of drugs to multiple stores and warehouses. The business process owners spend much of their time running the master plan(not during working hours) and then wait for the results. Even running the state of the art ERP "D365 Finance and SCM" they are not getting the desired results.

Business Challenge:

• Run the master planning for each vendor responsible to deliver specific drugs and this is a time-consuming process.
• If the demand is generated today for the wholesale customer, master planning will calculate and propose the planned purchase orders and planned transfer order tomorrow.
• They don't have the visibility of stock what exactly is required for the next 10 to 15 days to fulfill the orders.
• The business growing at a very fast pace and they are planning to open 10 to 15 Pharmacies in the future. It means more load on the current system. More resources are required to run the show.

Business Expectations

• The system should run the master planning for all sites and stores in one go in a smart manner.
• Business users should be able to run master planning during working hours.
• Planning should not take much time to generate the planned purchase orders and planned transfer orders.?

Proposed Solution

It's time to enable "Planning Optimization".

First, what is planning optimization?

• ?The Planning Optimization Add-in for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enables master planning calculation to occur outside Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and the related SQL database.
• The benefits that are associated with the Planning Optimization functionality include improved performance and minimal impact on SQL database during master planning runs.?

Prerequisite Setup

Planning Optimization Fit Analysis

• Fit analysis helps to identify where the results might differ between built-in master planning and Planning Optimization. The fit analysis is the part of the migration process, work with your partners to plan your migration.

Planning Optimization fit analysis helps you to identify where the result might differ between the built-in master planning engine and Planning Optimization. This analysis is done based on your current setup and data.

Run the planning optimization fit analysis. Here is the path in D365

Path: Master Planning> Setup> Planning Optimization fit analysis

Setup Planning Optimization

You can enable and disable the master planning optimization in D365, here is the path

Path: Master Planning> Setup> Planning Optimization Parameters.

Enable "Use Planning Optimization" to run the business scenarios.

My Observations with Master Planning and Planning Optimization

Here are my observations with Master Planning and desired outcomes with planning optimization

Scenario 1 – Only One Vendor

In this scenario, I have run only for one vendor which is associated with multiple items.

• Master Planning: In this case, the system has taken 7 minutes
• Planning Optimization: It has taken only 1 minute, below is the screenshot for your reference.?

Scenario 2 – Full Load

In this scenario, I have run for all the sites, warehouses, vendors, and items.

• Master Planning: It will take a good no of hours to get the results, so I have omitted this step. Go ahead and run in your system (Yes, one last time). Remember Patience is the key!
• Planning Optimization: I am surprised with the results, the system has taken only 3 minutes to run the complete show for all the items, sites, and vendors.

Now the million-dollar question, When you can run the Planning Optimization?

• You can run planning optimization any time, even during office hours without hurting AOS. Now a load of the AOS server has been taken out and the planning will run in Azure …The Azure!
• Below is the high-level data flow diagram. SCM sends signal requests to run the planning optimization.
• Planning optimization run and sending the signal back to SCM that contains planned purchase orders and planned transfer orders.

Conclusion and Recommendations

• You don't need to buy additional licenses to start to use planning optmization. If you can run a master plan, you can enable the planning optimization.
• The planning optimization feature is not available for On-premise deployments.
• Planning optimization improves the overall performance through short runtime.
• Businesses can run the planning optimization as soon as the demand is generated in the system without hurting the application. This will reduce the lead time to fulfill the customer and replenishment orders.

Go ahead and enable the "Planning Optimization" today in a test environment. All my blessings with you!

Also, feel free to share your observations in the comments section.

Truly Yours!

Ali Danish

Solution Architect - D365 Supply Chain Management