Planning recommendations are created based on many different bill of material and item attributes. Shrinkage rates, component yield and safety stock are some examples of attributes that affect the outcome of the planning process. There are various bill of material and item attributes that you can use to adjust the planning recommendations so that they conform to your manufacturing policies.

Standard Bills and Routings Only
For planned orders, only standard bills and routings are planned. Alternate bills or routings are not considered. For a discrete job, you may specify an alternate bill and/or routing. The planning process sees component requirements of the alternate routing for that job.

Phantom Bills of Material
A phantom bill (also known as a phantom assembly) describes a normally non–stocked assembly or subassembly. One purpose of a phantom bill of material is to allow you to manufacture and stock the assembly when necessary. You can use phantoms, for example, to build and stock occasional spares for field service requirements. When you implement planned orders for the parent of the phantom, Oracle Work in Process blows through the phantom and creates requirements for its components, ignoring any on–hand quantities of the phantom. Typically you set the lead time of the phantom to zero to
avoid any additional lead time offset for the components.

Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP and Supply Chain Planning uses the bill of material attribute to determine a phantom. Instead of passing the parent’s planned orders to the phantom, netting the phantom and passing requirements to the phantom’s components, the engine blows through the phantom to create component planned orders. Using the bill of material attribute to determine phantoms has two advantages: it allows for more flexibility, since a component can be a phantom in one bill and not another, and it makes treatment of phantoms in Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP consistent with Oracle
Work in Process.

Manufactured or Purchased
Three item attributes are evaluated to determine if planned orders are generated and implemented into discrete jobs, repetitive schedules, or purchase requisitions. Supply Chain Planning users can supplement and refine this behavior with sourcing rules and bills of distribution. See: Sourcing Rules and Bills of Distribution.

Make or Buy
This item attribute determines how the item is planned. The planning process looks at the Make or Buy item attribute to determine whether to generate component requirements. The attribute can have a value of Make or Buy and is directly related to the Build in WIP and Purchasable item attributes.
When implementing orders via the Planner Workbench, the make or buy attribute is used as the default for the type of planned order you can implement, either purchased or manufactured.

Build in WIP
This item attribute establishes if the item can be manufactured.

Purchasable
This item attribute allows you to establish whether the item can be placed on purchase orders or requisitions.

The following table illustrates the impact of these item attributes on the planning process: