With the flexible planning system, you can model the requirements of your entire organizational hierarchy in one plan and maintain planning data consistently across multiple organizational levels. This will give you the ability to drill down to different levels of the analysis and see different views of the data.

In order to define these organizational levels, you create a planning hierarchy. A planning hierarchy is based on an information structure. In a planning hierarchy, you specify values for the characteristics in the underlying information structure. In other words, a planning hierarchy groups together combinations of characteristic values. Before accessing the planning table, you specify the characteristic values you want to plan in a selection screen.