Collaborate on supply plans within and across teams
| Enabled for | Public preview | General availability |
|---|---|---|
| Users by admins, makers, or analysts | 
Sep 12, 2024 |
Dec 27, 2024 |
Business value
Master planning is a complex process that considers a wide variety of factors when deciding which goods and materials need to be ordered to keep the business running smoothly. Multiple supply planners, production planners, material managers, and other stakeholders are involved in and affected by the process. As a result, users working within and across teams often need to collaborate while entering relevant data and preparing and reviewing each plan.
To collaborate effectively, all contributors need access to the same, up-to-date information. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management now provides greatly improved support for master planning collaboration because it continuously recalculates your master plans, refreshing them after each edit. All planners and other stakeholders will nearly always see the latest, fully optimized planning results as they evaluate and update each plan.
Feature details
Master planning calculations consume significant computer resources, so companies typically schedule these processes to run overnight when spare computing capacity is available. As a result, a fresh set of optimized plans is available for review at the start of the next business day. Then, throughout the day, supply planners, production planners, and material managers can review and update each master plan as needed to accommodate new issues such as material delays, machine breakdowns, or changing priorities. As the day goes on, each modified plan can become progressively less optimized and harder to work with until the system has time to recalculate them overnight.
Because the planning engine in Supply Chain Management operates in parallel with the rest of the system, it's able to recalculate master plans throughout the day without affecting overall system performance. That means that freshly optimized supply plans are continuously available to all collaborators, thereby ensuring the best use of materials and capacity and minimizing delays in providing products to customers.