Supply and Demand Planning

This Supply & Demand Planning scenario describes an integrated planning process, that will be executed on a medium to long term basis including the elements of flexible planning, standard Standard Operation Procedure (SOP), long term planning, material requirement planning and capacity planning.

The starting point for this scenario is the flexible planning module, where the marketing or sales department will forecast the expected sales for a given planning period. To support the decision of the planner, the system provides a statistical forecast and history. The sales forecast provides the information for determining production quantities in production planning.

Production planning consists of the rough-cut plan and, in the next step, long term planning, which is simulated using different inactive versions of the production plan. The active version defined in the demand program enters the requirement quantities and dates for material requirement planning to guarantee a later availability of materials through purchasing and production proposals after the MRP run.

The planning scenario also describes resource planning in the planning scenario for determining the amounts of the work center capacities and other resources required to meet the production targets. Capacity planning can be used to support production planning for evaluating the capacity of single resources available, and for determining and comparing capacity requirements. In capacity levelling, the system optimally dispatches operations to the time when sufficient resources are available to cover them.

Furthermore, this scenario can be enriched by using the third party software Manufacturing Workbench. The OR Soft Manufacturing Workbench for SAP ERP provides a software add-on for detailed scheduling with the necessary SAP ERP plug-in and configuration in order to be able to get a full and dynamic overview over the supply chain (transparency of the production process) and to have enhanced functionality (scheduling and rescheduling of orders with different planning strategies) without additional infrastructure or data extension. It supports the detailed production and execution scheduling (APS, MES) as well as the planning of the in-house supply chain. It can be used as a simplified user interface for the SAP ERP system with regard to production logistics. Additionally it can be used as a platform for individualisation of higher level functions.

This scenario consists of the following steps:

• Demand planning
• Rough-cut production planning
• Long term planning
• Material requirements planning
• Capacity planning