Quick Interview Questions on ASCP

1.     What is the difference between ASCP and MRP?

            ASCP allows users to perform holistic planning by taking into consideration multiple organizations in an EBS instance where MRP plan considers only one inventory organization and multiple plans needs to be created for multiple organizations. ASCP allows constraint planning thereby taking into consideration supplier, organization capacity whereas MRP only facilitates unconstraint planning.

2.     What is the difference in running an ECC and EDD plan?

            ASCP plan with Enforce capacity constraints option ensures that all capacity constraints are honored which might result in demand due date getting pushed in to future.

ASCP plan with Enforce demand due date constraint option ensures that demand due date is given the priority and plan would overload Supplier or resource capacities to honor the Demand due date.

3.     What is the role of Memory based planner?

            The planning engine’s Memory Based Planner calculates the planned order demand due dates for dependent demands based on the actual requirement date with respect to lead-time. It saves the calculated requirement date based on the lead-time value for subsequent calculation.

4.     Explain the process of data collection?

            The data collection process consists of the Data Pull and the Operational Data Store (ODS) Load. The collection process lets you collect across Oracle Application Versions.

The two types of collections process are standard and continuous.

·         Standard collections process: Using the standard collections process, you can
manually run three types of collection methods including a complete refresh, a net change refresh, or a targeted refresh on specific business entities.

·         Continuous collections process: The continuous collections process is an automated process of data collection that efficiently synchronizes the data on the planning server by looking up the sources. If you opt for continuous collections, the system automatically determine the type of collection that needs to be run on entities selected by you. The continuous collections process collects data from the sources with the least user intervention. The Continuous Collections concurrent program performs continuous collections.

5.     What is the architecture of ASCP?

      Oracle Advanced Planning Suite has a component architecture that separates the transaction data and associated processing (for example, inventory receipts and order entry) in a source instance from the planning calculations done in a destination instance. This allows planning calculations to be done on a different physical machine than the machine that performs transactions and results in better system response. It also allows planning calculations (demand planning, inventory planning, supply planning and order promising) to be applied simultaneously to information from across multiple source instances, which is useful when transaction information for a global supply chain is spread across multiple instances.

6.     What is the purpose of exception messages?

·         The planning engine issues exception messages (exceptions) to:

·         Alert you to a situation that may need your intervention, for example, a past due sales order

Recommend that you perform an action; for example, change the date of a supply order. The planning engine issues certain exceptions for all plan types and others for only certain plan types. The planning engine only issues exceptions against items and resources that have exception sets assigned to them.

7.     What is meant by Hub and Spoke Planning?

      Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning provides you with the option of using
demands from all planned orders during hub and spoke planning. When you use your plans as demand schedules to other plans, the planning engine considers all planned orders in the source plan as demands and explodes down the bills of material creating demands for the lower level components.

      Hub and spoke planning uses a multi-plan approach where you can plan across
the supply chain at the top level and then release planned orders to a lower level
manufacturing plan for all MRP planned items. The top level plan includes only end items or end items with critical sub-assemblies, and typically only the final assembly plants. The lower level plan (MRP) is at the component level and includes the final assembly plants and the component manufacturing plants. Hub and spoke planning is a commonly used term for this type of subset planning.

8.     What is the difference between component substitution and End item substitution?

      Oracle ASCP supports two types of substitution: component substitution and end-item-level substitution.

      The term end-item refers to the finished good or saleable product. End-item-level substitution is an acceptable business practice in many industries. It is often possible to fulfill customer demand on time when the requested item is not available by substituting a more functionally rich product. Substitution is also done to use up existing inventory of older, functionally equivalent items.

Component substitution refers to substitution of component of BOM with another component.

9.     What is purpose of setting Demand Priority rules?
      Demand Priority rules guide the constraint plan in terms of identifying supply for demand based on the user defined rule.

      Demand quantities that are pegged to planned order supplies are considered in internal priority order. Demands with higher internal priority get the first opportunities to take up available resource and material capacities; demands with lower internal priorities can only use remaining resource and material capacities and are therefore more likely to be satisfied late.

10.  How is organization security maintained in ASCP?

      Organization security restricts plan information access to authorized individuals. Oracle ASCP allows users to associate job responsibilities to organizations for security purposes. This ensures that you see/change planning data in an organization only if you have a job responsibility associated with the organization.