Automatic Planning Immediately (SAP Library - Automated Production Planning and Optimization)

Automatic Planning Immediately

Purpose

You use Automatic planning immediately to perform multi-level planning of products that use lot-for-lot order quantity or fixed lot-sizing procedures. Products are planned immediately when automatic planning is triggered.

Automatic planning is triggered when:

New requirements are transferred to PP/DS
Requirements are changed
Product master data that is relevant to planning is changed
The production process model (PPM) is changed
Stocks are moved
Other changes relevant to planning occur

Once automatic planning is triggered, the system performs an availability check for a product and the components that are also defined as being planned automatically and immediately. If a product is not available, it automatically creates suitable receipt elements while taking resource capacity into account. The system selects the procurement alternative with the most favorable costs that can fill the order on the requested date.

To plan products using any other lot-sizing procedure, you use the planning strategy automatic planning in the planning run.

Prerequisites

You have set the Automatic planning immediately indicator in the product master (PP/DS tab) for the product. If you wish to perform an availability check for the product, you must also set the Automatic planning immediately indicator for the components of the product.

To allow the procurement option with the most favorable costs to be selected during automatic planning:

You have maintained the costs for products produced in-house in the production process model.
You have maintained the costs for the transportation lanes in the Supply Chain Engineer (for products procured externally and stock transferred from other locations).

For the other prerequisites, see the necessary master data and PP/DS settings.

Process

In order to cover new or changed requirements for each product that is planned automatically and has undergone a change relevant to planning, the APO system performs the following steps during automatic planning:

The system attempts to cover the product requirement with existing stock or orders with appropriate dates and assigns available receipt elements to the requirement using pegging.

If enough stock or orders exist to cover the requirements, planning is completed.

If not enough of the product exists, the system determines the quantity that is to be procured based on the requirement that is not covered, using lot-size calculation and taking into account the assembly scrap.

Using the type of procurement you defined in the product master, the system determines how the product is to be procured:

If you have defined in-house production, the system creates planned orders. If you have defined several production process models (PPM), the system selects the most favorable PPM according to the priority and costs.
If you have defined that the product is to be procured externally, the system creates purchase requisitions, schedule lines, or stock transfer orders. If you have maintained several procurement options in the Supply Chain Engineer, the system selects the alternative according to its priority and costs.
If you have defined that the product can be procured externally or by in-house production, then the system selects the alternative according to the priority and costs from the production process models or the Supply Chain Engineer.

The system schedules the orders:

For external procurement, the planned delivery time of the product is determined from the transportation lanes maintained in APO.

For in-house production, the APO system explodes the PPM and performs detailed scheduling to determine the dates for the order.

When exploding the PPM for products, the system determines component requirements, the net duration and the resource consumption of the activities. During this process, assembly scrap is taken into account when determining the component requirements.

To determine the requirement dates of the components, the activities are scheduled to the resources. Scheduling is carried out according to the settings you have maintained in the strategy profile, in which you define the constraints the system is to consider during detailed scheduling, for example, the component availability and the capacity of the resources.

There are two kinds of resources: bottleneck resources and non-bottleneck resources. Usually, there are only a few bottleneck resources in a production plant. For every resource, you can determine if you want to carry out finite scheduling or infinite scheduling. In most cases, you carry out finite scheduling for bottleneck resources only. In addition, you can also carry out finite scheduling for resources that you think may be bottleneck resources. For non-bottleneck resources, you usually carry out infinite scheduling.

If constraint violations occur, for example, the customer requirement date cannot be met or the capacity of a finite resource is exceeded, they are displayed as alerts. You can reprocess the planning results manually.

Result

The availability check is carried out for all bill of material levels until suitable receipt elements have been found or created for all levels. The orders created during automatic planning are immediately transferred to the connected OLTP system so that up-to-date planning data is available in both systems.