You can set up and use various master plans to support your company's daily working operations, simulate different planning strategies that you want to monitor, and implement a company policy, for example concerning internal performance or customer satisfaction. You can configure master plans in the Master plans form.

There are two types of plans:

• Static plan– The master scheduling calculation uses the current data to generate a net requirements plan. This plan remains unchanged until the next time you run master scheduling. It is an operating plan that various company personnel, such as a purchaser or production planner, can use to base their decisions on and carry out their daily tasks and activities.

• Dynamic plan– This plan starts out with the same net requirements plan that was generated by master scheduling. However, you can update the dynamic plan each time the master data changes. This could be when you create a new sales order, for example. This enables you to monitor the changing order network and item availability without disturbing the static plan that others are using for their work processes.

A company may choose to work with just a static plan or to use both static and dynamic plans. In addition, you can configure any master plan to reflect a particular strategy or address an issue. Examples are:

• Setting higher inventory levels to ensure against stockouts.

• Setting longer safety margins to protect against unreliable vendors.

You can also set up the starting dynamic plan to be updated with the new requirements plan each time you run master scheduling. You can specify these settings on the Parameters form.