Capacity leveling is used in various areas of a company and at different planning levels with the following objectives:

• High capacity load
• Adherence to dates
• Short lead times
• Low stocks

The objectives of capacity leveling include:

• Leveling overloads and underloads at work centers
• Achieving optimum commitment of machines and production lines
• Selection of appropriate resources

You can carry out capacity leveling in the SAP System in the following application areas: Sales and Distribution (SD), Production Planning and Control (PP), Plant Maintenance (PM) and the Project System (PS).

The SD system represents an overall industry-wide solution for dealing with sales, shipping and billing. One function of sales is to create and process sales orders. From within sales order maintenance the system can automatically create an assembly order or a network. From within the sales order you can branch directly to the planning table to display the capacity situation.

The capacity leveling process in production planning (PP) depends on the planning level at which it is to be carried out.

It is important to distinguish between the following planning levels:

• Sales and operations planning (SOP)

• Long-term planning (LTP)

• Master production scheduling (MPS)

• Material requirements planning (MRP)

• Repetitive manufacturing (REM)

• Shop floor control (SFC)

Whether rough-cut, production rate or detailed planning is used depends on the planning level. You can easily move between the individual planning levels.

In Sales and Operations Planning (SOP), you specify sales volumes for the long-term and medium-term and the production activities necessary to realize these sales. The system carries out rough-cut planning to estimate the production levels necessary to support these figures. In capacity leveling, the quantities to be produced should be roughly compared to the productive capacity.

In long-term planning, you can plan several versions of the demand program using a simulated planning run. You can check the results using special evaluations so as to gain an early overview of future plans for production and procurement.

The objective of master production scheduling (MPS) is to carefully plan those parts which have considerable influence on the final product. These are, for example, products that represent a high proportion of total sales or that dominate the entire production process because of how they are manufactured.

MPS uses capacity leveling to reconcile the capacity situation before the planning results affect all BOM levels. Once the master plan for a master schedule item has been created, material requirements planning is started.

The objective of material requirements planning (MRP) is to ensure that material is available, that is, to plan the quantities required both by production and by sales and distribution. MRP determines what material is needed at what date and then creates the necessary order proposals. For products made in-house, material requirements planning always generates an order proposal as a planned order.

The planned order contains specifications for the lot to be produced and the resources required for production. The system calculates capacity requirements using the order specifications. These capacity requirements are the basis of capacity leveling.

Repetitive manufacturing is used for the repeated production of the same product over a long period of time. It is used to create and process master plans for a defined period and a specified quantity.

Repetitive manufacturing uses production versions. You create a run schedule header covering a certain period for a production version of a material. In the material master you specify task list and BOM alternatives as well as a production line for a production version. The task lists are generally rate routings. Capacity leveling is carried out on the basis of a production line.

Shop floor control converts MRP planning data into concrete production orders. A production order specifies what material is to be produced or what activity is to be carried out where and at what time. It also explicitly determines the work centers to be used.

When you create a production order, the system automatically carries out lead time scheduling and writes capacity requirements records. Capacity leveling at the production order level is used for detailed planning.

PP-PI is an integrated standard solution for logistics tasks in the process industry. This solution covers the whole logistics chain. Several of the PP-PI modules (for example, sales and distribution) have been taken over from logistics, while others, such as master recipe management are independent. PP-PI refers to capacity leveling as "process planning".

Plant maintenance aims to maintain the operating efficiency of technical systems such as machines or production plants. You use a maintenance order to carry out a maintenance task. The system can carry out capacity leveling and detailed planning in plant maintenance based on the capacity requirements of maintenance orders.

The project system uses networks for process-oriented planning of a project. Capacity requirements are calculated during network scheduling when there is a work center assigned to the activity in the network. Capacity leveling at the network level is used for project planning.