Formula Planning in Business Processes 

Use

In order to plan quantities and costs of your business processes in formula planning, you can use mathematical dependencies. You can set these mathematical dependencies in templates in the form of formulas, which are independent of the business processes. This allows you to use the same formulas for similarly defined business processes. You can enter fixed and variable costs and quantities, per activity unit, in the calculation of the formula.

Formula planning supports manual planning. Formula planning is especially appropriate for the planning of cost elements, whose values are determined from business processes with similar logic.

For formula planning, you create templates and assign these to one or more business processes. Additionally, you can define sub-templates that can refer to higher level templates.

You can use the following data from the SAP System in formula planning:

• All master data information relevant to the business process: for example, to narrow the definitions
• The plan primary costs of your choice
• Plan activity, scheduled activity and capacity of the chosen business process
• User defined statistical key figures

• The SAP System calculates costs in the template using only the controlling area currency.
• Activity inputs, activities and order costs cannot be planned.
• Formula planning is possible in business processes, cost centers and profit centers.

• Template maintenance
• In template maintenance, you can define one or more formulas for an object (cost element, statistical key figure or calculation row) on separate lines or rows (see: Formulas). The SAP system evaluates these formulas by calculating objects (cost element, statistical key figure or calculation row) a line at a time. You can link functions (see: Functions in Environments), which enable the reading of plan or actual values, with simple formulas.
• With interim results, which you can depict in the Calculation rows, you can calculate complicated formulas. With activation (see: Activation) you can also build in requirements under which a formula operates.

• The execution of formula planning and evaluation of the template (see: Executing formula planning)
• While evaluating a template for business processes, the SAP system applies the formula defined in the template, and calculates the desired costs, quantities or key figure values. The system then calculates each line in the template for the corresponding business process. If the object is a cost element or statistical key figure, the system also creates a planned record for the object, in the corresponding business process. This planned record overwrites any manual planned record, and can itself also be overwritten in the manual planning.
• During the execution of the formula planning, you can enter the business processes of your choice or all of them. The SAP system searches for the template corresponding to these business processes and evaluates them. You can start the evaluation as often as you want for a business process.

Create a template in environment BPP (see: Template for Formula Planning Process and IMG for controlling under Overhead Cost Controlling -> Activity-Based Costing -> Templates -> Maintaining templates).

Assign the business process to a template (see Assigning Templates for processes/Cost centers).

Execute the formula planning (see: Executing Formula Planning).