Overview of Backlog Management

All the sales orders that have been promised but not yet shipped to the customers are referred to as Backlog. The principal role of Backlog Management is to improve the scheduling dates of the orders.

Why Backlog management when GOP is available:

  • In GOP the scope of simulations and prioritization is limited, data analysis is difficult (e.g. Constraining Items within a ship/arrival set cannot be known), demands display is line level even for sets, MOPD can search results upto 500 records only etc.
  • Whereas in BM all the above are addressed and it has advanced features for improving the scheduled dates.

Process flow diagram showing GOP and Backlog process design:

Backlog Management User Interfaces:

  • Backlog Analysis – the Backlog Analysis is the core Backlog Management workbench. All the simulations and prioritizations can be done within this User Interface. Using search criteria, specific demands can be retrieved and re-scheduled.
  • Backlog Analytics – the “Backlog Analytics” UI will display Order Backlog Analytics- Infotiles. It is the graphical representations of the Backlog data based on certain parameters which helps to analyse the data quickly.

Backlog features and functionalities:

  • Enforce Current Commit- This feature is used to honor the existing scheduled date of the demands. If set to “Yes”, will try to meet the scheduled date of the demands. If it is set to “No”, there is no hard constraint to meet the scheduled dates.
  • Pull-In –This feature when set to “Yes”, will try to meet the Requested date after it has met the scheduled dates (when ECC=Yes). If ECC=No, it directly plans to meet the Requested date.
  • Demand Priority Rules – Priority rule is used to prioritize the demands based on both standard and custom attributes.
  • Calculated Priority – Based on Demand priority rule, it populates the priorities in multiples of 10
  • Override Priorities – User can change the priorities and re-plan to improve the high priority demands.
  • Manage set – Using Manage Set, user can view the lines within a set and has additional functionalities to improve the planned dates:
  • Item Availability Date – Displays the supply availability of the items in a set, which helps to identify the most constraining items within a set.
  • Remove from set – Sometimes the most constraining item in a set might not be that important for the customer but could be the reason for the delay of the set. In such cases, we can remove the constraining line from the set using this feature and improve the set planned dates.
  • Add Back to set – The line has been removed from the set, can be added back to the set using this feature.
  • Manually Override Plan date – User is allowed to specify planned ship/arrival date which need to be honored
  • Lock and Unlock Orders – Locking the demands will not allow any changes to it. Unlocking demands allow to perform simulations and re-plan it.
  • Earliest Acceptable Dates – Demands will be planned after the EAD
  • Latest Acceptable Dates – Demands will be planned if supply is available within LAD else will not plan
  • Release Planning Results – This functionality will release the backlog planned demands to
  • Planning Collections (which is accessed by both GOP and BM)
  • Generates .CSV file for external source systems and
  • Updates the scheduled dates in Order Management Cloud.

So newly planned dates will now show as Scheduled dates in Collections and Cloud OM.

So far, Backlog Management proves to be a strong tool to improve the Backlog based on the business requirements. It is yet to evolve to provide a better user experience which helps the businesses to handle their Backlogs efficiently thereby improving the revenues and customer satisfaction.

Abhiram is a Sr. functional consultant with an experience of over 8 years working on Oracle SCM and Planning Cloud. He has been part of the various implementation and support projects.

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