This strategy, along with Planning w/ a Planning Material and w/o MTO (63), allows you to procure components on the basis of planned independent requirements. Production of the finished product, however, is based on actual sales orders. This planning strategy ensures that you can react quickly to customer requirements, even if the finished product has a long overall lead time. You can avoid the main value-added process until you have a customer.

• Maintain strategy group 52 on the MRP screen.
• Set the lot size key EX must be set in the MRP screen because lot size optimization would be incompatible with the allocation logic, which could result in over-planning and incorrect result in the ATP check. You also must ensure that no rounding profile or rounding values are taken into account.
• Maintain consumption parameters (Consumption mode, Bwd consumption, Fwd consumption) so that the independent requirements can be found.
  For more information, see Consumption Strategies and Logic.
• Maintain the item category group (for example, NORM) on the Sales Organization screen.

For a detailed example of the entire process, see Sample Scenario: Strategy 52.

1. Production quantities can be planned relatively effectively by means of planned independent requirements for the finished product. It is possible to use information from the sales forecast, or from the Sales Information System, or other planning tools to plan production quantities. Only the procurement of the component is triggered before the sales order stage. Final assembly takes place after a sales order has been entered.
2. The planned independent requirements are consumed during the sales order stage. This means that you can compare the planned independent requirements situation with the actual customer requirements situation.
3. An availability check is performed on the basis of the planned independent requirements.
4. Demand from sales orders is passed on to production and triggers production after the sales order stage, even if insufficient components are planned. The sales orders, however, cannot be confirmed if there is insufficient coverage of components. For more information, see Coping with Insufficient Coverage of Components.
5. Planned independent requirements of the finished goods that are left unconsumed increase the warehouse stock of the components and cause procurement to be decreased or not to take place at all in the next period. This procedure is known as "netting."
6. From the costing perspective, this strategy is a make-to-stock strategy, in contrast to strategy 50, which is make-to-order. This means that stock of the finished material is not linked to each customer order. This strategy does not take stock that exceeds the planned independent requirements (unplanned stock due to, for example, customer returns or over-production) into account, when creating a sales order. Stock for finished goods should be handled through an exception process .

In this strategy, there is only an availability check against planned independent requirements. A material is considered to be available if a planned independent requirement can be consumed. See Availability Check.

See Stockkeeping at Different BOM Levels.

You must also add an alternative strategy (either 30 or 40 in this case) to strategy group 52 in the IMG for Production (choose Master Planning ® Demand Management ® Planned Independent Requirements ® Planning Strategy ® Define strategy group).

Sales personnel must be informed of this unplanned stock.