What Is a Planning Hierarchy? 

Definition

A planning hierarchy represents the organizational levels and units in your company for which you want to plan. A planning hierarchy is a combination of characteristic values based on the characteristics of one information structure.

Planning hierarchies provide a framework for your planning activities in consistent planning and level-by-level planning. With these planning methods, a planning hierarchy must exist for the information structure before you can plan its key figures. You can create only one planning hierarchy for an information structure. However, a hierarchy can have as many different branches as you like. See also Planning Hierarchies Containing Product Groups.

When using consistent planning, you can create the planning hierarchies automatically using the Master Data Generator. For Standard SOP (info structure SO76), you can generate the planning hierarchy using report RMCPSOP or RMCPSOPP, based on the existing planning data in the info structure. The report functions are documented in the comments of the source coding for each report.

You can also create a planning hierarchy manually (see Creating a Planning Hierarchy). It consists of one or more planning levels to which you assign characteristic values.

You maintain planning hierarchies in much the same way as you maintain product groups, on a level-by-level basis, and define the aggregation factor and the proportional factor of each characteristic value just as you define them for the members of a product group. For more information, see Planning Hierarchy Maintenance Functions.

 

Example of a Planning Hierarchy

 

You might extend this planning hierarchy to include further branches, such as branches to represent the organizational structure of the company in sales organizations South, East, and West.