In interactive planning in APO, the product planning table from 3.0 provides you with an additional, universal planning tool – as well as the detailed scheduling planning board and the product view. You can use the product planning table to create a master plan and you can use it to evaluate the results of the planning run. It is an operative planning tool and is used for planning production quantities. The product planning table is particularly useful for repetitive manufacturers as you can use it to plan materials and loads on the production lines/resources simultaneously. Therefore, it covers both product and capacity planning. As well as for production planning, you can also use the product planning table for planning externally procured components. That is, the product planning table also provides an interface for the procurement planner.

• In Repetitive and Flow Manufacturing, planning and control is carried out on the basis of periods and quantities. The layout of the product planning table has been designed to support this requirement and is also based on periods to provide a very clear, easy-to-interpret overview of products and production lines over the time axis.
• The product planning table is the planner’s most important tool for dispatching the production quantities. At a glance the planner can check production quantities, monitor the available capacity of the production lines and check up on the availability situation of the products produced on each line
• You can directly enter and change production quantities in the product planning table. You can reassign production quantities to alternative resrouces.
• As planning is often carried out on a shift basis, functions are also available in the product planning table for distributing production quantities over shifts. You can also define a flexible period split. Here, different periods can follow each other, for example two days in shifts, three weeks in days and two months in weeks.
• You can also use the product planning table for planning and procuring components. This means, the procurement planner can monitor the stock/requirements situation and create or change purchase requisitions and schedule lines/scheduling agreement releases directly in the product planning table. SAP also provides a separate default profile for the procurement planner which he can choose for the configuration of the product planning table.

The product planning table provides you with a periodic, aggregated view of:

• Production
• External procurement

You select the resources and products for which planning is to be carried out using a navigation tree. You use the navigation tree for displaying alerts and for navigating through the Supply Chain and the BOM. You can group by location, planner, resources, rows and sources.

A flexible selection of detailed screens with many views is available:

You can also access Heuristics and Optimization procedures from the product planning table.