You use Automatic Planning in the Planning Run to plan products using heuristics that you have defined for each product. You are able to use your own heuristics or you can use heuristics provided by SAP. A large variety of heuristics are available to plan products that address particular planning problems, including lot-sizing heuristics and purchase order quantity optimization.

When automatic planning is triggered, a planning file entry is created for the products. These products are then planned in the next net change planning run. An advantage of planning products in the production planning run, as opposed to automatically and immediately, is that, you can control when and how often products are planned. You are therefore able to improve performance by executing planning runs at less busy times of the day.

• You have set the Automatic planning in the planning run indicator in the product master (PP/DS tab) for the product.

For more information on these heuristics, see Heuristics for Production Planning.

You can plan just the products that have undergone a change relevant to planning (net change planning run) by selecting the Planning file entry created indicator on the initial Production Planning Run screen. If you do not select this indicator, all products in your selection are planned.

You specify which products and which locations are to be planned for a planning version in the appropriate fields. Additionally, propagation ranges are used to define the scope of planning. Only products that are contained in the propagation ranges are planned during the planning run. The propagation range can thus be used to restrict the level of planning, that is, by using a propagation range that does not contain the components for a product, you can plan single-level. In this case, a planning file entry is set for the component so the dependent requirements are planned during the next planning run for this product.