I. Overview

Master planning fundamentally enables companies to forecast and balance their future needs for raw materials and capacity to achieve their objectives. It involves evaluating the following:

  • What raw materials and capacities are currently available?

  • What additional raw materials and capacities are needed to complete production?

This includes identifying what needs to be manufactured, purchased, transferred, or set aside as safety stock before production can be completed.

Master planning uses this information to calculate requirements and generate planned orders.

The three main planning processes are:

  1. Master Planning: This process calculates net requirements based on current orders, allowing companies to manage inventory replenishment on a short-term, day-to-day basis. This is also known as the Net Requirements Plan. For more details, refer to the Master Plans Overview.

  2. Forecast Planning: This process calculates gross requirements based on future projections (forecasts), enabling long-term planning of materials and capacity. For more details, refer to the Demand Forecasting Overview.

  3. Intercompany Master Planning: This process calculates net requirements across legal entities, linking demand and supply between companies for both short-term and long-term planned (not yet firmed) demand and supply. For more details, refer to Intercompany Planning.

Companies can adjust the output of the plan using regenerative or net change methods. Regenerative plans update all requirements, while net change plans only update items with new requirements since the last scheduling run.

Master scheduling typically covers the short term, ranging from one week to six months. The Master Planning module determines the supply (materials) and capacity (resources) needed to meet current demand (net requirements). In most companies, this planning is extended to include the longest cumulative lead time among the products to be received.

II. Learning Map

The following learning map shows the major concepts and tasks that make up the framework of the Master planning module.

III. Install and Enable Planning Optimization

To use Planning Optimization, you must make sure your system has all of the prerequisites in place and then enable its configuration key and install the Planning Optimization Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Prerequisites

Before you install the Planning Optimization Add-in, the following prerequisites must be in place:

You must be running Supply Chain Management on an LCS-enabled high-availability environment, tier 2 or higher (not a OneBox environment), with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management version 10.0.7 or later. If you try to install the add-in on a OneBox environment, the installation won't complete and you'll need to cancel the installation.

Your system must be set up for Power Platform integration. For more information, see Microsoft Power Platform integration with finance and operations apps.

Your Microsoft Entra account must have a Supply Chain Management licensed assigned to it. As mentioned previously, you don't need an extra license for Planning Optimization, but you do need a Supply Chain Management license to install it. If you get an error message regarding licensing while installing the Planning Optimization Add-in, check your licenses as described in Assign licenses to users.

You must sign in to your Power Platform environment using an account with administrator privileges and an access mode of Read-Write. If you get an error message regarding missing user permissions while installing the Planning Optimization Add-in, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Power Platform admin center.

2. Open the environment where you want to install the add-in.

3. Go to Settings > Users and select your user account from the list to see its details.

4. From your user details page, select the Client Access License (CAL) information link.

5. On the Client Access License (CAL) information page, make sure that Access Mode is set to Read-Write.

IV. Enable the Planning Optimization configuration key

To use Planning Optimization, you must enable its configuration key. To do so:

1. Put your system into maintenance mode, as described in Maintenance mode.

2. Go to System Administration > Setup > License Configuration.

3. On the Configuration keys tab, select the check box for Planning Optimization.

4. Turn off maintenance mode, as described in Maintenance mode.

V. Install the Planning Optimization Add-in

You must install the add-in from your LCS project and then turn on the Planning Optimization functionality from the Supply Chain Management user interface.

To install the Planning Optimization Add-in:

1. Sign in to LCS, and open the desired environment.

2. Go to Full details.

3. Scroll down to the Environment add-ins FastTab.

4. Select Install a new add-in.

5. Select Planning Optimization.

6. Follow the installation guide, and agree to the terms and conditions.

7. Select Install.

8. On the Environment add-ins FastTab, you should see that Planning Optimization is installing.

9. After a few minutes, Installing should change to Installed (you may need to refresh the page). When installed, you're ready to activate Planning Optimization in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The main purpose of installing the Planning Optimization add-in is to connect the service and the environment. Therefore, you must install the add-in separately on each environment where you'll use Planning Optimization, regardless of any code moved between the environments.

VI. Turn on Planning Optimization for your environment

After you've installed the Planning Optimization Add-in for your environment, you must enable it in Supply Chain Management before you can start using it.

To configure your system to use the Planning Optimization Add-in for master planning, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Supply Chain Management.

2. Navigate to Master Planning > Setup > Planning Optimization parameters.

3. Open the General tab.

4. Check the Connection status. It will show one of the values listed in the following table.

5. If the Connection stats is Connected, then you're ready to enable Planning Optimization. Use the Use Planning Optimization option to choose which planning engine is used for master planning. Select one of the following options:

Yes – Planning Optimization is used for master planning for all companies (unless overridden for one or more specific companies).

No – The deprecated master planning engine is used for master planning for all companies.

Note: 

If existing planning batch jobs that were created for the deprecated master planning engine are triggered while the Use Planning Optimization option is set to Yes, those jobs will fail.

The Next few blogs will look into a few scenarios using different configurations.

Thank you!