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Calculation of Material Shortages and Uncovered DemandLocate this document in the navigation structure

Use

In material requirements planning, one of the main tasks of an MRP controller is to monitor the material shortage situation and solve any issues on time. Another main task is to ensure that sufficient supplies have been planned to cover your requirements – whether from sales orders, stock transfer orders, or from your own production, for example. The goal is to ensure that both customer and production demand are available on time and to avoid any disruptions due to missing parts. To enable the MRP controller to fulfill these goals, you can define a material shortage profile and material shortage definitions in Customizing. These Customizing settings provide sets of rules that the system uses for calculating material shortages, uncovered external demands, or uncovered internal demands. These rules define the scope of the shortage calculation meaning the supply and demand elements to be considered, the conditions that have to be met to be a relevant shortage, or the priority of the demand elements.

In the apps for Material Requirements Planning, in the Shortage Definition drop-down list, you can choose the shortage definition that you want the system to use to calculate the material shortages or uncovered demands. Depending on the shortage definition you choose here for the material shortage, for example, the system displays the result of the material shortage calculation in the stock availability chart.

Prerequisites

Default configuration settings are provided for these apps in Customizing for Production under Start of the navigation path Material Requirements Planning Next navigation step Apps for Material Requirements Planning Next navigation step General Settings End of the navigation path. Check whether the SAP standard configuration settings meet your business requirements. If this is the case, no further changes are necessary. Otherwise you can tailor the following Customizing settings to your needs:

  • In the activity Define Supply and Demand Profiles, you create supply and demand profiles.

  • In the activity Define Material Shortage Profiles, you create an appropriate material shortage profile with material shortage definitions.

  • In the activity Assign Material Shortage Profile to Users, you assign the material shortage profile to your users. This controls which material shortage definitions the user can choose from in the apps for Material Requirements Planning.

Note

If you create new material shortage definitions or change existing ones, these changes are not visible in the MRP apps immediately. To update Customizing changes in the apps, you can either wait until the cache is automatically updated the next day or you can trigger a cache update manually using the report Cache for MRP Apps (PPH_MRP_SET_CACHE). For more information on this report, see the system documentation.

Features

You can create one or more material shortage definitions for your material shortage profile. How to create the material shortage definition depends on whether you are creating a shortage definition to calculate material shortages, uncovered demands, or uncovered manufacturing order components:

More Information

For more information, see Customizing for Apps for Material Requirements Planning under Start of the navigation path Production Next navigation step Material Requirements Planning Next navigation step Apps for Material Requirements Planning Next navigation step General Settings End of the navigation path. Here, refer to the Customizing documentation for the activities Define Supply and Demand Profiles, Define Material Shortage Profiles and Assign Material Shortage Profile to Users.