Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) is a comprehensive planning solution that decides when and where supplies should be deployed within an extended supply chain. It allows for multi-organization planning across customer, manufacturing, distribution, and supplier organizations. ASCP performs holistic planning across the entire planning horizon, supply chain, and all manufacturing methods in a single plan. It also enables constrained, finite capacity planning while respecting material and capacity constraints. Optimization allows the planning process to determine the lowest cost plan based on assigned costs and penalties.

1. Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) Overview
Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) is a comprehensive, Internet-based planning solution that decides when
and where supplies (for example,inventory, purchase orders and work orders) should be deployed within an extended
supply chain.
The key capabilities of Oracle ASCP are
Multiorganization Planning
ASCP and SCP allow you to model complex supply chains and provide a unified plan for the entire supply chain. Your
model can include customer preferences (for example,which organizations can supply which customers), multiple
manufacturing and distribution organizations within your enterprise, and your suppliers. In simple cases, you might be
able to model your supply chain using item and organization attributes. For more elaborate supply chains, you can define
sourcing rules and bills of distribution and apply different sets of assignments of those rules.
Holistic Planning
The term holistic planning was coined by Oracle to suggest that one plan could meet all the needs typically addressed by
multiple plans in more traditional planning scenarios. Holistic planning eliminates or reduces the need to keep multiple
plans in synch. Specifically, holistic planning accommodates three dimensions of the planning problem:
 One plan can accommodate the entire planning horizon, with the appropriate level of granularity at different points
along the horizon.
 One plan can accommodate the entire supply chain, from your customers, through the distribution and
manufacturing organizations within your enterprise,and down to your suppliers.
 One plan can accommodate all manufacturing methods: discrete, repetitive, process, flow, and project- (or contract-
) based manufacturing.
Constraints
Unlike Oracle MRP planning, ASCP can respect various constraints on your production and distribution capabilities. This
capability, sometimes called finite planning or constrained planning,enables you to generate a plan respecting material
constraints, capacity constraints (including both manufacturing resource and transportation capacity), or both. You can
plan for detailed or aggregate resources, and you can use item routings or bills of resource to control the granularity of
the planning process.
You can enforce constraints selectively across the planning horizon. It may be important, for example,to recognize
material and capacity constraints in the near term to avoid creating a plan that you can’t execute.But at the far end of the
horizon, it may be more important to generate an unconstrained plan to determine how much additional capacity you
might need tomeet the anticipated demand.
Constraint-based planning is a prerequisite for optimized planning—if there are no constraints, the assumption is that
you can do anything; there’s nothing to optimize.
Optimization
ASCP includes the option to generate an optimized plan. In an optimized plan, the planning process determines the
relative cost of the different options available to it and chooses the “best” alternative based on those costs.Some of those
costs are naturally present in your ERP data, such as the cost of using a substitute item or an alternate resource. Other
costs are computed in planning by applying penalty factors to different events.For example,you might assign a penalty
factor of 50 percent to exceeding resource capacity (reflecting that you would pay time-and-a-half if you had to work
overtime); you might assign another penalty factor to satisfying a late demand,to artificially add cost to late production.
In addition, optimization is influenced by the weight you give to each of three explicit planning objectives: Maximize Plan
Profit, Maximize On-Time Delivery, andMaximize Inventory Turns.
Integrated Performance Management
ASCP incorporates performance management features from Oracle’s Business Intelligence System (BIS). The Planner
Workbench for ASCP displays four Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each plan:
 Inventory Turns The inventory turns you could achieve if you executed the plan as suggested
 On-Time Delivery The percentage of ontime delivery, to customer orders or to internalorders, that the plan
projects
 Margin Percentage The anticipated margin (profit) that would be generated by following the suggestions of the plan
 Resource Utilization The utilization of resources projected by the plan

2. Release 11i.5 ASCP provides additionalKPIs; right-click the workbench to select the following indicators:
1. Margin The margin amount (i.e., currency) that would be generated by following the plan suggestions
2. Cost Breakdown A comparison of four separate costs—Production Cost, Inventory Carrying Cost, Penalty Cost, and
Purchasing Cost
You can use BIS to define targets for each of these KPIs. The Planner Workbench displays a graph for each of these KPIs
and their targets so that you can easily assess the effectiveness of a particular planning strategy. ASCP also provides
enhanced exception messages and uses Oracle Workflow to provide notification and response processing for all those
exceptions.
Plan Types
ASCP uses basically the same plan types as traditional MRP, but uses slightly different names:
 Distribution Plan equates to a DRP, or Distribution Requirements Plan.
 Manufacturing Plan equates toan MRP, or Material Requirements Plan.
 Production Plan equates to a Master Production Schedule,although there are significant differences between the
earlier MPS and a Production Plan defined in ASCP.
Architecture
ASCP is able to run on a separate server from your ERP system. This architecture eliminates any performance degradation
on your transactions systems when a plan is running,and it enables you to run plans more often and more quickly than
with traditional planning systems. (If you will run your plans overnight or at nonpeakhours, you can use the same server
for both ASCP and ERP.)
The separate-server architecture also facilitates planning for multiple ERP systems; you can define multiple ERP instances
to plan, collect their data to the planning server,and then run one single, consolidated plan with the aggregate data.
Because planning is designed torun on a separate server from ERP, you must explicitly publish the planning data backto
the source instance to perform certain activities in your ERP system. The Push Plan Information concurrent program
provides this function.For example,if you want to create flow schedules from an ASCP plan,you must run this program.
Whether you run ASCP on a separate machine, a single machine, or the same database instance as your ERP system, the
process of setting up and running ASCP plans is unchanged—you must still define the source instances that planning will
use and you must still collect data from those instances to the planning server.
Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) is a comprehensive, Internet-based planning solution that decides when
and where supplies (for example,inventory, purchase orders and work orders) should be deployed within an extended
supply chain. This is the supply planning function. Oracle ASCP addresses the following key supply planning issues:
 How doI plan my supply chain in the least amount of time possible?
 How doI minimize the number of plans and iterations?
 How doI plan my entire supply chain?
 How doI involve my trading partners?
 How can I access my plan from anywhere?
 How doI keep improving my plans?
 How can I plan all manufacturing methods?
The key capabilities of Oracle ASCP are:
 Holistic Optimization, Planning,and Scheduling.Oracle ASCP can plan all supply chain facilities simultaneously.
Short-term detailed scheduling and long-term aggregate planning are supported within a single plan.This single
plan also supports multiple manufacturing methods, including discrete, flow, project, and process manufacturing.
 Finite Capacity Planning and Scheduling.Oracle ASCP generates feasible supply chain plans that consider both
resource and materialconstraints.
 Optimization. Users can easily configure Oracle ASCP to optimize specific business criteria. No programming is
necessary to access Oracle ASCP's powerful mathematicaloptimization capabilities.
 Backward Compatibility. Oracle ASCP's component architecture allow it to be deployed against any version of
Oracle transaction systems.
 Workflow-Driven Exception Messaging. Oracle ASCP's exception messages alert planners to critical issues across
the extended supply chain.Workflows that drive these exceptions route data to and feedbackfrom trading partners
as required,thus effectively involving them in the supply chain planning process.

3.  Global Accessibility. Oracle ASCP's database-centricarchitecture stores plan data in a central planning server
database.These data are accessible from anywhere via a simple browser. It is possible for multiple planners to
simultaneously access data from a single plan.
 Integrated Planning and Execution.Oracle ASCP's Advanced Planner Workbench user interface not only displays
plan results, but also allows planners to execute planning recommendations. Planners do not have to move to the
transaction system to perform plan execution.
 Simulation Capability. 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. Examples of the types of changes are firming, changing sources,
modifying quantities and dates,modifying priorities, modifying resource availability, modifying supplier capacity,
and modifying objective weights.
Oracle Advanced Planning Suite
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