How a Leading North American Commercial Vehicle Manufacturer Scoped Master Planning to a Single Site or Warehouse in Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management

A single master plan covering every plant is simple to set up and easy to explain: one run, one set of planned orders, one schedule. It’s also where the friction starts once a business runs more than one plant with different products, different suppliers, and different teams responsible for each.

Planners at one plant end up looking at planned orders shaped in part by another plant’s on-hand corrections and forecast edits. A coverage code change made for one site’s parts can shift output for a site that has nothing to do with it. And because it’s one run, a data issue at any single plant (a bad forecast import, a stuck transaction) can delay the plan for every other plant waiting on the same run to finish.

Master plans have always supported an item filter. What’s new is a Stock Dimensions table sitting alongside the Items table inside the plan filter, meaning a plan can now be scoped by Site, Warehouse, Batch number, or any other inventory dimension, not just by which items it considers.

That distinction matters: this isn’t a coverage-code setting that changes how the plan computes numbers for items it already sees. It changes what the plan sees in the first place. The filter cascades to every planning input, including inventory transactions, forecasts, and item coverage settings like safety stock. Two plans with the same items can end up looking at entirely different supply and demand once their stock-dimension filters diverge.

The feature ships behind Feature Management, disabled by default:

With the feature enabled, scoping a plan to one plant is a setup task, not a code change:

The client’s plants didn’t just need separate scopes; they needed separate policies. One plant runs standard assembly parts with no lot tracking; another runs batch-tracked, shelf-life-sensitive components that need on-hand stock consumed before anything else. The stock-dimension filter made both plans possible from the same master plan setup, configured independently:

Neither configuration affects the other. Plant B’s shelf-life logic never touches Plant A’s parts, and Plant A’s simpler setup isn’t forced to carry batch-level complexity it doesn’t need.

From Master Planning > Run > Master Planning (or the Master Planning workspace), select the plan for the plant you want to run. The system generates planned orders only within that plan’s stock-dimension scope, and nothing from other sites enters the calculation. The standard item filter is still available at run time to narrow further, or it can be left blank to run every item within the plan’s scope.

This is the detail that caught our planning team off guard the first time: stock-dimension scoping only works through the master plan’s own Plan Filter, not through the ad hoc runtime dialog filter. Open that runtime dialog and only the Items table is available; Site, Warehouse, and Batch simply aren’t selectable there.

A single global master plan is easy to stand up, but it forces every plant onto one schedule, one policy, and one set of coverage assumptions, whether or not that fits how the business actually operates. Scoping Planning Optimization to a site or warehouse turns that one plan into as many independently governed plans as the business needs, each with its own filter, its own pegging behavior, and its own run cadence.

The trade-off is planning ahead rather than improvising: because the scope has to be built into the master plan itself rather than applied at run time, every site that needs independent planning needs its own plan record set up in advance. For a multi-plant manufacturer, that upfront setup is a small price for planners who can finally run their own numbers without waiting on, or being distorted by, every other plant on the floor.