Alternative planning overview

Alternative planning lets you work with a variety of products with different order quantities, attributes, or due dates. These products may differ in small or large ways and often require setup and cycle time before the actual manufacturing starts.

You can clone a plant bill of process (BOP) and bill of equipment (BOE) from a working production plant BOP (master), and the cloned alternative plant BOP and BOE maintains a relationship with the original structures. The alternative plant BOP serves as a replica of part or all of the master plant BOP that you can use to plan for a new manufacturing program without affecting the working production program. The alternative program can be used with Process Simulate without harming any simulations being run on the master and the information stored to Teamcenter as you add new resources and data.

As you change items, processes, isolated and shared studies, and other objects, you can run an accountability check between the trial and production plant BOPs for comparison and update them as necessary. When finished and ready to apply the trial structure to production, you can synchronize it to the production structure.

Note

You can also propagate studies from a collaboration context (CC) tree by right-clicking the alternative CC's top line and choosing Propagate All Studies.

The process of creating a trial plant BOP with an additional product BOP and product may be as follows.

You can similarly use a part or all of an existing plant BOP as a template to create a new alternative planning environment for supplier collaboration and other processes outside production. Planning environments can be created by cloning selected work structures in a plant BOP rather than cloning the entire plant BOP and BOE.

You can also update structures from a production plant BOP to a cloned plant BOP, or vice versa, using an advanced accountability check. You can update structures in several ways. You can quickly:

• Propagate operation changes to a production or alternative plant BOP.

• Update moved elements in an alternative BOE.

• Update moved elements in an alternative plant BOP.

• Update a production plant BOP from a cloned plant BOP and vice versa.