The Demand-to-Make / Demand-to-Buy Business Flow
The demand-to-make /demand-to-buy business flow begins with the establishment of independent demands that will drive the activities of the supply chain. On the basis of sales history from Oracle Order Management, Oracle Demand Planning generates statistical demand forecasts. After adjustment by planners, these forecasts and
their variability as estimated by Oracle Demand Planning are then input into Oracle Inventory Optimization.

Using user-supplied information about the variability of this forecast demand and the variability of supplier lead-times, Oracle Inventory Optimization generates an optimal time-phased safety stock plan.

Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (hereafter, Oracle ASCP) considers three streams of independent demand: the safety stock planned demand from Oracle Inventory Optimization, forecasts from Oracle Demand Planning, and sales order demand from Oracle Order Management. Oracle ASCP outputs a time-phased supply plan (planned orders) that can then be released directly to the appropriate execution systems: Oracle Purchasing, Oracle Work in Process (for discrete manufacturing), Oracle Process Manufacturing, Oracle Flow Manufacturing, Oracle Project Manufacturing, or Oracle Shop Floor Management (for semiconductor manufacturing).

The Inquiry-to-Order Business Flow
The demand/supply picture output by Oracle ASCP serves as the basis for the order promising results calculated by Oracle Global Order Promising. Oracle Global Order Promising can be called either from a customer-facing order capture application such as a web store or from Oracle Order Management.

In the inquiry-to-order business flow, an inquiry for a potential order is sent from Oracle Order Management to Oracle Global Order Promising. The fulfillment date returned by Global Order Promising, if later than the original request date, is populated as the new request date of the order. This request date validation process is called scheduling. Once an order is successfully scheduled, then it can be booked and made visible to Oracle ASCP for supply planning purposes.

Planning Cycle
This section describes an end-to-end planning flow that a planner might perform during the course of a planning cycle. The flow demonstrates the key features of Oracle ASCP that a typical planner would use in the course of their work. The general flow that occurs during a planning cycle is shown in the figure below.