Epicor Kinetic Planning Parts - Is forecast consumption supposed to reduce demand for ALL Planning BOM components?

Kinetic ERP
1

We are implementing Planning Parts in Epicor Kinetic (currently 2025.2) for a configure-to-order manufacturing environment.

Business Goal

We want to forecast common top-level components rather than forecasting hundreds of finished goods individually.

Because a finished good can only belong to a single Planning Pool, we’ve grouped finished goods into Planning Parts and built Planning BOMs containing the common components with Planning Percentages.

Our Experiment

We created a Planning Part with a planning pool containing multiple finished goods.

The Planning BOM contained:

  • Top Level Components
  • Appropriate planning percentages

We then:

  1. Created a forecast for the Planning Part.
  2. Ran MRP.
  3. Entered sales orders for finished goods that only used a subset of the Planning BOM components.
  4. Regenerated MRP.
  5. Compared Time Phase before and after the sales orders.

What we observed

The Planning Part forecast was consumed correctly.

However, Time Phase suggests that Epicor also reduced demand for Planning BOM components that were not used by the ordered finished goods.

For example, a plunger that was not part of any ordered configuration still showed reduced suggested supply after forecast consumption.

Questions

  1. Is this the expected behavior of Planning Parts?
  2. Does forecast consumption intentionally reduce Planning BOM demand proportionally across every Planning BOM component?
  3. Is there any configuration that causes consumption to occur only for the components actually used by the ordered finished good?
  4. If not, how are manufacturers successfully using Planning Parts to forecast common subassemblies or top-level components?
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