Changes to customer purchase and delivery requirements is a significant source of instability in supply chain planning. Understanding the level of variability in customer purchase requirements is very important in accurately planning the demand that can be expected from the customer and being able to successfully fulfill that demand.  The ability to track the variability in customer purchase and delivery requirements is especially important to manufacturers, operating within supply chains, such as the automotive supply chain, that receive forecast requirements from their customers via purchase releases.

The Advanced Business Planning application has been enhanced with the ability to track changes to open customer orders/releases.  With this change, a snapshot of the open customer order line/release is now saved when the Demand Plan is approved in Advanced Business Planning.  The monthly customer order line/release snapshots are now displayed in the waterfall chart and grids.  The waterfall configuration popup has been extended to display all the order line snapshots, so they can be selected for display on the chart.

New line has be added to the waterfall grid to display volume of open customer order lines/releases based on historical snapshots.

Changes have been made to the storage of the Linking Mode between finished good items.  Currently if multiple items linked to an old item, the linking mode of the last link will be applied to all previous links, no matter of the type of mode of the previous links.  With this change the linking modes of all links to the old item are preserved, and are not modified by the addition of future links to the old item. On the screen, only the last linking mode that was loaded is shown.  The downloaded report can be used to see all the linkages and their linking modes that are associated to the old item.