Production Campaign Planning

Purpose

You mainly use production campaigns in companies in the process industries that manufacture their products on production lines. These production lines must be set up or cleaned between the processing of different production charges or before downtimes. The products manufactured must often not only be stored finally but also temporarily, for example, if they are to be consumed by a subsequent manufacturing level. These setup or clean-out processes as well as the storage may be very cost-intensive.

The main aim of campaign planning is to weigh up setup costs and storage costs. Frequent changes of the production line, for example, may help to reduce storage costs but at the same time lead to increased setup costs. If, on the other hand, the production line is set up as seldom as possible, this may reduce the setup costs but at the same time increase storage costs.

You can use the campaign planning functions to combine orders manufacturing the same or similar products into production campaignsto reduce setup and storage costs in particular.

You can decide whether you want to use campaign optimization to plan campaigns or campaign heuristics .

Prerequisites

If you want to use campaign optimization for your planning, the following requirements must be met:

You use only one bottleneck resource within a production process model or, if there are more bottleneck resources, they are defined as alternative resources only.
There are no cross-order relationships or pegging relationships between the activities at the bottleneck resource.

Note
If these requirements are not met, you can use campaign heuristics to plan campaigns automatically.

End of the note.

For more information on further requirements for the various functions, see the relevant sections under:

Process Flow

Step	Planning with Campaign Heuristics
1	Orders are created, for example, from requirements of Supply Network Planning (SNP) and are transferred to PP/DS. Note If you use campaigns in SNP, set the Periodic lot size indicator in the resource master data. (For more information, see Cross-Period Lot Size Planning ) End of the note.
2	You delete existing campaigns, setup and clean-out orders using the heuristics Dissolve campaign and Delete setup/clean-out orders since PP/DS optimization cannot process them.	You start campaign optimization in the DS planning board or the production planning run. The following steps 2 to 6 are carried out automatically.In addition, the system takes the storage costs into account when optimizing campaigns.
3	You start PP/DS optimization for selected resources (bottleneck resources) in the DS planning board or the production planning run.
4	PP/DS optimization creates an order sequence with optimized setup times at the selected resources.Storage costs cannot be taken into account.
5	Using the heuristic Create production campaigns , you let the system create campaigns consisting of orders that follow each other and have the same setup group or product in the DS planning board or the production planning run.
6	If you want to use setup or clean-out orders, you execute the heuristic Adjust setup/clean-out orders or the function Adjust setup/clean-out orders in the DS planning board.The system replaces sequence-dependent setup activities by setup or clean-out orders. (See Setup or Clean-Out Order Creation )
7	If required, you correct the planning in the DS planning board or the campaign transaction and eliminate campaign alerts .
8	You fix campaigns if you do not want them to be changed by another automatic planning run.
9	If the planning situation changes, you start again with step 2.
10	You convert the planning to process orders for SAP R/3. (See Campaign Integration Between SAP APO and SAP R/3 .)