For the MPS planning layer or mid-term planning, the typical horizon lies between 3 and 18 months, depending on the order book, the market, the industry, etc. Important for the planning layer, is that we can deal with actual products, and not high level aggregates, like product families.
When doing the planning on this layer, we often see one of the following situations for the external demands that drive the planning:
1. Order based, maybe with some small portion of specific forecast (of products), mostly MTO (Make-To-Order)
2. Volume based, for instance in commodity markets, where no availability means no sales order, or like in discrete manufacturing series production, so mostly or solely MTS (Make-To-Stock)
3. Balanced. A balanced mix of MTO and MTS
For the first situation, the DELMIA Quintiq CompanyPlanner is well suited. It has a clear focus on delivering orders on-time-in-full (OTIF), typically deals well with priority for specific orders. It delivers also full visibility across the supply chain, how orders are fulfilled. But it also allows for re-evaluating material usage across different orders, and if one order can steal material from another order, to increase the global plan, the solution can (and typically will) do so. Also for order acceptance, a full ATP (Available To Promise) and CTP (Capable To Promise) is supported.
For the second situation, in most cases the DELMIA Quintiq MacroPlanner is best suited. It really plans materials in a flow based & volume based way, a bit alike the ERP function of MRP, but then taking machine/supplier/transportation capacity fully into account, supporting campaigns, supporting calendars & shift patterns, etc. But the drawback is that the full visibility across the supply chain for the external demands, is not supported as well as in the first situation. In some cases, even for the MTS situation CompanyPlanner can be a good choice, but that then depends on some specific/exotic requirements for the planning process, which I will not elaborate further here.
For the third situation, in most cases DELMIA Quintiq CompanyPlanner can be the best choice, but it really needs to be validated in detail against the planning process to be supported.
As you can imagine, CompanyPlanner and MacroPlanner also have commonalities, and the most obvious one is that both solutions are high on optimization. Both solutions can be used to generate a best-in-class planning based on the input data like MasterData, external demands (customer orders, stock levels, service levels for products), actual materials (both finished good, intermediate products and raw materials), and of course the capacities at hand. And from there, both solutions support the planner in making the best manual choices to fine tune the feasible plan to the needs of the company.
