Online Planning combines the benefits of an automatic planning procedure with those of ordering manually. You can have the system suggest external vendors, articles and order quantities that you then verify based on other information. Since a stock planner in the retail trade often has to deal with up to a hundred vendors a day and up to a hundred articles for each vendor, SAP has made every effort to make the online planning process as simple and efficient as possible. All the information you require is contained in the one easy-to-read screen, including:

• The articles offered by a vendor

• The purchase orders placed with this vendor

• Information important for planning requirements (such as the current stock on-hand, current purchase orders, sales figures for the last periods)

• Information about the articles (such as the content of each order unit)

In Online Planning, you can plan articles for which a requirement was determined and also articles for which no requirement was determined (for example, to enable you to achieve certain minimum order criteria). To enable you to do this, you can select all the articles supplied by a vendor.

This means that you can order items from a vendor on the days defined as regular ordering days, even though the article is not yet required.

Online Planning can only be used for procuring merchandise from external vendors.

Online Planning has been developed from the additional planning function. Additional planning allows you to select all the articles carried by a vendor on the order entry screen and add extra items to an existing purchase order.

In this way, you can order additional articles that were not suggested by the automatic planning run (for example, to make full use of the capacity in the means of transport used). As of the current release, you should use Online Planning instead of additional planning for external vendors.

Online Planning offers the following features:

• Creation of a worklist with the following options:

• Selection of a worklist based on the ordering days defined for the vendor

• Arrangement of the worklist by distribution center and vendor

• Freely definable layout of the worklist (you can change the sort sequence, for example)

• Link from the worklist to displaying additional information (for example, site or vendor master data)

• Link to an overview of forecast and consumption values for several periods, including the following detailed information for each period:

• Forecast value

• Actual consumption

• Manually corrected consumption

• Smoothed consumption (for promotions within a period)

• Order quantity suggestion, for example based on the following procedure:

• Specified range of coverage in days

• Quantity from the last purchase order

• Own method (via user exit EXIT_SAPLWFOD1_003)

• Display of the planning list in ABAP list viewer format for easy printing