Supply Chain Planning Within a Plant (SAP Library - Supply Chain Planning Within a Plant)

Supply Chain Planning Within a Plant

Use

In SAP R/3, you can model the supply chain within a logical or physical plant on the basis of storage location MRP areas. With little effort in master data maintenance, you can map the in-plant procurement relationships and the procurement relationships to other plants or vendors. When the master data is transferred to SAP R/3, the plant and the storage location MRP areas are automatically transferred as independent locations to SAP APO. The master data (products and sources of supply) are automatically distributed to the locations for which they are relevant in accordance with the MRP area structure of the plant. In SAP APO, this data forms the basis of detailed Supply Chain Planning below plant level, which you execute with the applications Demand Planning (DP), Supply Network Planning (SNP), Capable-to-Match (CTM), or Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS). You transfer the procurement proposals that you create with the planning applications to order processing in SAP R/3. In accordance with the constraints in SAP R/3, you only plan make-to-stock production in storage location MRP areas in SAP APO. You plan make-to-order production or engineer-to-order production in the plant location.

Otherwise, the storage location MRP areas in SAP APO do not differ from other location types. They behave like normal locations. Therefore, they might be source or destination locations in transportation lanes, or planning or production locations in in-house production sources of supply.

In SAP APO, you can map the following in-plant procurement processes using storage location MRP areas:

● Stock transfer between two locations

In SAP APO, you can use a transportation lane to map the stock transfer of a product between two storage location MRP areas or between the plant location and a storage location MRP area.

● Component withdrawal in another location

The withdrawal of a component in another location in the plant corresponds in SAP R/3 to the withdrawal of a component in a specific storage location in the plant. As in SAP R/3, you model this operation in SAP APO without a stock transfer with a suitable in-house production source of supply.

A supply chain model based on the storage location MRP areas in SAP R/3 is flexible. You can adjust it quite easily to changed supply chain processes or to changed organizational structures by changing the assignment of storage locations to the storage location MRP areas in SAP R/3. With little effort, you can adjust the master data and transaction data in SAP APO accordingly. By using storage location MRP areas in SAP R/3, you can therefore detach the modeling of the in-plant supply chain from the relatively inflexible plant definitions and the plant dependency of the master data (material master, bill of material, and routing).

Prerequisites

If you want to execute Supply Chain Planning within a plant in SAP APO based on storage location MRP areas from SAP R/3, the following prerequisites have to be met, in addition to the requirements that apply in general to an integrated scenario:

● You have installed the release SAP R/3 4.6C or higher* and the Plug-In 2003.1 in the connected SAP R/3 System.

* The main difference between the different R/3 Releases are shown in the following table:

Function/Release	4.6C	4.70	4.70 + Extension 2.0
Mass Maintenance for Material Master Assignments to MRP Areas	X	X	X
Change Documents for Master Master Assignments	X	X	X
System-Supported Restructuring of MRP Areas	X	X	X
Stock Transport Orders Between MRP Areas			X

● In SAP R/3, you have activated MRP area processing and integrated the storage location MRP areas with SAP APO (see Integration of Storage Location MRP Areas).

● To integrate the orders created in SAP APO with SAP R/3, you have created distribution definitions at plant level in SAP APO.

● You have created sources of supply new in SAP APO to map procurement processes in SAP APO for which you cannot transfer any sources of supply from SAP R/3. For example:

○ If you want to execute a stock transfer between two storage location MRP areas, you have to create a transportation lane between the storage location MRP areas in SAP APO.

○ If required, you have to generate SNP PPMs from the transferred PP/DS PPMs as usual.

Features

● In SAP R/3, a storage location MRP area is not for all plants, countries, or time zones. The address of the receiving storage location must be in the same country and the same time zone as the plant. In an integrated scenario, these constraints also apply to SAP APO.

● In SAP APO, you execute independent planning for each location. You cannot perform hierarchical planning in which you plan first at plant level and then at storage location MRP area level.

● SAP APO does not support scenarios with storage locations that have equal weighting. A storage location in the storage location MRP area is the leading storage location. The system assigns receipts, which the system creates in the storage location MRP area, to the leading storage location by default. An ATP check in the sales order at storage location MRP area level automatically copies the leading storage location of a storage location MRP area into the sales order.

● In SAP APO, for storage location MRP areas, the net requirements calculation and dynamic pegging are performed at location level and not at storage location level. These functions are therefore not specific to a storage location.

Example

● There are several production plants and distribution centers in a region. You want to plan the material flows from the production plants to the distribution centers. In SAP R/3, you can map the region as a plant and the distribution centers and production plants in the region as storage location MRP areas.

● In a large plant, there are several production areas that plan independently. The area definitions can change at any time as a result of restructuring. Here, you do not model the production areas in SAP R/3 as independent plants, but as storage location MRP areas.