VMI: Planning Replenishments for Customers
Use
You use this function to plan replenishments for a customer. The replenishment planning run results in sales orders that you transfer to the customer by EDI in the form of an order acknowledgment. This enables vendors, for example, to calculate customer requirements automatically and supply the customers with exactly the quantities they require.
Integration
The system determines the relevant stock data from the replenishment article master data. The sales data received by EDI is stored in information structure S130 of the information system and analyzed in replenishment planning. Sales data received that refers to promotions is not taken into account in replenishment planning.
Prerequisites
You must also create a customer master record for each customer site for which you want to plan replenishments. All customer master records belonging to a company must be assigned to exactly one sales area. The numbers of these master records have to be entered in the partner functions of the sold-to party as ship-to parties (goods recipients).
Features
Replenishments are planned in the following steps:
Planning
During the planning phase, the system determines the replenishment requirements. Two methods of planning can be used, depending on the RP type involved:
If the article is assigned the RP type for static target stock (standard RP), the requirements are calculated as follows:
Requirement = target stock - current stock figure for customer
If the article is assigned the RP type for dynamic target stock (standard RF), the system calculates the target stock based on the future sales forecast. This is only possible if you previously forecast the sales in flexible planning or if the customer transferred the sales forecast data to you. The target stock is calculated as follows:
Target stock = total sales quantities forecast during the target range of coverage + safety stock
If you entered a minimum or maximum target stock in the replenishment article master data, you define the target stock even further. Requirements are calculated in the same way as planning using a static target stock.
If you define a safety stock, the system checks if the stock has fallen below the safety stock. If you run the planning transaction online, the system displays the requirements calculated and you can change them as required.
Generation of follow-on documents
After requirements have been determined, the system then generates sales orders with the order type TAV as follow-on documents. You have to start this program manually on the screen for displaying requirements.
During follow-on document generation, the system rounds off the order quantities (order quantity optimizing), which can lead to the quantity required being changed. The quantity actually replenished is the requirement quantity after it has been rounded off. After a sales order has been generated, the stock figure for the customer concerned increases by the quantity of the sales order.
The sales order is transferred to the customer by EDI in the form of an order acknowledgment (message type ORDRSP with the message variant VMI). In the standard system, order acknowledgments are generated for sales orders as messages of the type BAV0. You must create the required condition records for this.
Replenishment Monitor
You can configure the general control parameters of Replenishment so that the results of the replenishment run are updated on the database. If you activate updating, you can display the results of Replenishment in the Replenishment monitor.
Each time you execute the program for planning replenishments, the system stores the replenishment run under an internal number. The transaction can be identified via this number in any subsequent analyses in the replenishment monitor. The results are divided into three categories (successfully processed, workitem created, containing errors). Each category contains information on how the items were processed (for every combination of customer and article).