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  Product Flow

Definition

You use the product flow to specify at an activity of the PPM plan that a product will be removed from or filled into a resource with storage characteristics (container resource) during production.

Caution Caution

The product flow should not be confused with the material flow . This is an attribute of the activity relationship and defines if the scrap of activities, which are linked by the activity relationship, is calculated as cumulated or individually for each activity.

End of the caution.

Structure

In the PPM plan, you assign the product flow to the activity that is on the container resource that is used for filling or removing products. You can define one or more product flows for an activity, but you can only assign each logical component to one activity per PPM plan. If you want to assign the same logical component several times, you have to use different PPM plans.

The product flow is characterized as follows:

  • The product flow ID, which you use to define if the product is removed or filled at the start or end of the activity or continuously

  • The logical component of the activity that is removed or filled.

  • The container resource into which the product is filled or from which it is removed

    Note Note

    To assign a product flow to an activity, choose Product Flow .

    End of the note.

Integration

You can define the product flow in SAP APO or in SAP R/3.

In SAP R/3 , you assign the product flow to operations or phases on the Material Component Assignment screen in the master recipe . The data is assigned to the activity of each PPM plan during the transfer via the SAP APO Core Interface .

Example

A logical component (raw mixture) should be filled in a container, then processed further in two different ways, and removed from the container for this. Since three activities with the same logical component have to be assigned a product flow, three different PPM plans have to be used. A PPM plan is defined for each of the segments Fill , Remove for Further Processing A and Remove for Further Processing B . A product flow with the same logical component (for example, raw mixture), but with a different product flow ID, is assigned to each activity of the PPM plan.