Oracle ASCP - An overview

I am here trying to place all my learning on Oracle ASCP. This might be helpful for you if you are trying to prepare for an interview on ASCP.

ASCP is an acronym for Advanced Supply Chain Planning. It is a part of Oracle SCM product.

The Oracle Advanced Planning suite includes the following products:

• Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP)
  
• Oracle Collaborative Planning
  
• Oracle Demand Planning
  
• Oracle Global Order Promising
  
• Oracle Inventory Optimization
  
• Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling
  
• Oracle Production Scheduling
  
• Oracle Strategic Network Optimization

Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) is a tool that decides when and where supplies should be deployed, in what way resources should be used, to deliver the product in time. It can also forecast the demand for the finished good. Short-term detailed scheduling and long-term aggregate planning are supported within a single plan. The plan also considers resource and material constraints.

Oracle ASCP allows many types of changes to supply, demand, plan options, and resource profiles to simulate changing business conditions. You can generate a plan considering all the changes that have been entered via the Planner’s Workbench. Unlimited numbers of scenarios can be simulated and compared using online planning, copy plans, and exceptions.

Prerequisite for planning cycle

Before you start running a plan, you should first setup the data needed for planning. It includes the Items, Bill of Material, Resources, Calendars, Locations, Regions, Routing, Customers, Suppliers and many more.

More details of the prerequisites will be covered in my later posts.

Planning Cycle

A Day in the Life of a Planner

Generate/update forecasts, create new MDS: MDS is a Demand Schedule. How do u generate a demand schedule? Some Sources of Demand are:

You can drive the plan with:

• Sales order demand
  
• Forecast demand
  
• A combination

The forecast demand comes from:

• Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP on the source instances.
• Oracle Demand Planning
  
• Oracle Demantra
  
• Your own system

You can create an MDS from an MRP plan.

Once the MDS is ready, u should run collections to bring planning data from the source instance to the planning server, where the data will be accessible to Oracle ASCP.

Now its the time to create a plan. You can run the plan by specifying many plan options. We will come to that section later.

Now that we have run the plan, what is the plan output? How are we going to use it?

The plan output contains planned order quantities, start dates, and completion dates for the item we have planned and all of its components and sub-components.