You can use the MPS component (PP-MP-MPS) to flag materials, which greatly influence company profits or which take up critical resources, as master schedule items and to check and plan them separately with a series of special tools.

MPS is executed using the same principles as MRP.

The aim of MPS is to reduce storage costs and to increase planning stability. This is useful in the following cases:

• To ensure that there is good material availability, various floats and a safety stock are entered, which inevitably lead to high stock levels. Thus, high storage costs are incurred, especially for valuable materials.
• The master plan of these materials greatly influences the entire production process: The planning of the dependent parts depends on the planning result of the finished products and main assemblies, even if the finished products represent a small share of all the materials to be planned. Frequent changes at finished product level can render the complete MRP run unstable.

In order to be able to work with the MPS component, you require the MRP component (PP-MRP) as well as all further components that are required for MRP.

The system does not plan master schedule items in the normal MRP runs. This ensures that these materials can be planned independently from the other planning.

In the MPS menu there is a separate single-level planning run, which can be executed as single-item planning or total planning. This planning run only includes the master schedule items. Dependent requirements are created for the BOM level directly below the planning level. Levels below this, however, are not planned.

This means that the MRP controller can authorize any changes to the master plan before they affect the various BOM levels.

You can protect the master plan from any automatic changes to master schedule items in the near future by using a planning time fence. Within the planning time fence, the system does not automatically schedule or change the procurement proposals. Therefore, the MRP controller has time to plan the master schedule items manually. However, to support the MRP controller, the system can create necessary procurement proposals and schedule them for the end of the planning time fence. You can then schedule these procurement proposals manually as you wish.

With interactive planning, you can check the results of the automatic planning run for master schedule items with simple and easy-to-use tools and simulate changes and regenerative planning. The system does not save the planning data in the database until you save the interactive planning.

Interactive planning is especially useful for adjusting dates of planned orders falling within the planning time fence.

With the help of the user-friendly structure of the planning results, you can react quickly and efficiently to any problems that may occur. A series of standard evaluations are available within MPS to achieve this. You can also generate individual evaluations according to your specific needs.