Project Orders in SAP APO
Purpose
Companies following the engineer-to-order or project driven make-to-order manufacturing model, design and manufacture customer-specific products with high project lead times, which often cover several months. This approach is widely used in the Industrial Machinery & Components and Aerospace & Defense industries, and sometimes in the High Tech and Automotive industries for custom-engineered products such as complex networks or farm machinery.
To track the engineering, manufacturing, assembly, shipping, and installation processes, you can use a project to keep track of the overall activities related to the customer order. You use a project order to carry out initial rough-cut planning for basic dates and critical resources. After definition of the product structure in the engineering process, you link project planning to manufacturing planning through material components for main assemblies linked to specific project order activities.
Aside from project manufacturing for customer-specific products, projects are used in many industries for new product development. They often include material and capacity requirements for prototype building and therefore also require integrated project and material planning.
Integration of the PS network as a project order in SAP APO, enables companies to leverage project and manufacturing execution capabilities in SAP R/3 and planning capabilities in SAP APO; this results in one seamlessly connected planning and execution loop.
Integration of the PS network from SAP R/3 into a project order in SAP APO includes activities, relationships, and material requirements. You can schedule the project order capacity requirements in SAP APO. The result can be transferred back to the PS network in SAP R/3. You can plan and schedule the material requirements attached to the project order activities in SAP APO.
Recommendation
The documentation for project orders is mainly integrated with the documentation for Integration of SAP APO and SAP R/3 , SAP APO Master Data , and Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS) . Therefore, we recommend you also view that documentation.
This documentation is intended as a quick guide to project orders in SAP APO.
Constraints
The integration of project orders in SAP SCM has some constraints. For more information, see SAP Note
708517 Project Manufacturing - Restrictions
.
See also: