Question:
Hi fans!!!
I am not an APO expert so i have this question for u
I have 10 different countries settle up in my system, and of course each of them have their own demmand planners. I set up a planning area and a planning book for one of them and my idea is to set up identical planning books and areas for all of them, having then 10 different planning areas. These planning areas will have exactly the same structure.
Is that the best practice, or shall i have to try to set up just one planning area for all of them?
Do the users are going to be blocked when they start working?
Thx in advance!!!
Answer:
I would recommend one planning area/book. You can control who accesses data via the selection profiles. As long as the selection profiles don't overlap, the users will not be able to lock each other.
Answer:
I'd try and keep things easy for yourself from a maintenance point of view and have one planning book/data view.
If you can keep the process the same for all ten countries then great ! Though I suspect you may get some resistance from one or two countries, if things are different from the way they forecast now.
Answer:
Would be advisable to restrict the number of planning areas to one and make as many planning boook/data views as required out of it. 10 planning areas are going to take a lot of livecache
If not allowing visibility to the other countries planning books is an issue you can restrict the data view authorizations to the relevant users or if using the dame data view restrict the selection profile authorization and create country specific selection profiles.
the other problems with the 10 planning areas would occur when you consolidate data for all countries, data backup etc. then 10 planning area consistency cheecks and reinitializations and a lot of other issues multiplied 10 times
planning area locking might happen but i guess you need to train the users to be on display mode when not using or how to find who is locking and ask them to come out if needed.
Answer:
Its OK it have a single planning area for if the countries are sharing same process but few other aspects that I thought are like
1) if there is any change in process requested by a single country it would become difficult to manage considering tha fact that all other countries also share the same configuration
2) Using a single planning area and POS will also increase the CVCs handled can detoriate the performance
3) The data management will be bit tricky and functions like realignment (if required) should be handled carefully
4) impact of mismanagement (scheduling a wrong background job for instance) would me on higher side with such set of configuration
Offcourse there are also many advantages of having a single planning area as stated by various posts above.
So you you can evaluate the Pro's and Con's of both approaches
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"If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions" - Swami Vivekananda
Answer:
you can get into locking problems. to prevent one county from locking another you must have a characteristic that contains a single value (not a range ) that is unique to each person. so if you had Canada and US as two countries. if one of your planners selected both in a selection id it would lock the total planning area. See the locking oss note.