Rough-cut planning profiles are used in resource leveling. In a rough-cut planning profile, you plan the requirements of one or more of the following resources:

• Work center capacities

• Materials (typically, raw materials)

• Production resources/tools

• Costs

These are the resources you will require to meet a sales target, production target, purchasing target, or any other logistic target you have set for a material, product group, or characteristic value combination.

Rough-cut planning profiles are designed to give you an aggregate view on your resources; that is, you look at workdays rather than hours or minutes, and work center groups and product groups rather than individual work center or products. They are therefore an ideal tool for medium- and long-term planning or for the planning of hierarchies.

You enter your resources data in a few easy steps: the system guides you through a series of dialog boxes. The results of your entries are shown in a resources table which is laid out along the time axis.

The resources table displays a lot of information at a glance, that is, the resources required not just for the final assembly but for the entire production process, starting with the lowest-level components and ending with the finished product. Planned resources are displayed in the periods to which they relate.

In a rough-cut planning profile, you define the following:

• The material, product group, or (in the case of an information structure) combination of characteristic values requiring the resources.

• The key figure causing the resource load (if the rough-cut planning profile is defined for an information structure).

• The time span of one planning period in the resources table, expressed in workdays.

• The status of the rough-cut planning profile (as in a routing).

• The planner group of the rough-cut planning profile (as in a routing).

• The usage of the rough-cut planning profile (as in a routing).

• How much of which resource is required for the base quantity. For example, if the base quantity is 1 piece, the amounts you enter on one line of the resources table are the amounts required to produce 1 piece. Moreover, if you enter amounts in four columns, each column representing a timespan of one workday, then you are saying that it will take four workdays to produce 1 piece using this resource. The amounts you enter for the resource "work center" apply to each capacity category at the work center.

• The base quantity; that is, the number of units for which the resource is required. You cannot change the base quantity once you have saved the rough-cut planning profile. (In Release 3.0 the base quantity was always 1. In Release 4.0 you define the base quantity as required.)

• The lot size range if the quantity of the resources required depends on lot size. Different lot sizes can have different base quantities. For example, a lot size of 1-10 may have a resource requirement of 1, and a lot size of 11-100 a resource requirement of 10.