Events, Event Types, and Event Catalogs

Events represent the occurrence of an event in the real world that has a discernible effect on the demand of certain planning objects in Demand Planning. Events have a specific time of occurrence, a duration, and an effect on the demand. An event, can be, for example, the Christmas of 2009.

Event types specify the concept of an event. For example, if the event in question is the Christmas of 2009, the event type is Christmas. Event types have a duration and an identifier. They can have a reoccurrence pattern and you can specify periods before and after the occurrence of the event where demand is also impacted.

Event catalogs are hierarchical groupings of event types.

Events can cause variation and outliers in the demand. You can use events to identify these variations and outliers, and as a result, potentially increase statistical forecast quality by removing the outliers from the history time series before forecasting.

The system uses the event types you define to describe and categorize the actual events. An event type contains the following information:

ID
Description
Periodicity (day, week, month)
Duration
The period before and after the actual occurrence of the event in which the impact potentially occurs.

In addition, event types can be reoccurring. In this case, the event type also contains the pattern that defines the exact dates on which the event reoccurs. You can define the event type reoccurrence based on the following:

A simple recurrence definition (for example, the 15th of every second month)
A holiday from a holiday calendar (for example, Christmas)
For more information, see SAP Library for SAP NetWeaver on SAP Help Portal at http://help.sap.com/nw703, under SAP NetWeaver by Key Capability Application Platform by Key Capability ABAP Technology Other Services Services for Application Developers Calendar .

The start date of the events based on a holiday in a holiday calendar is calculated as follows:
- The number of days in one period is added to the date of the holiday (intermediate duration)
- The system then determines the period with the largest overlap with the intermediate duration and assigns the start date of this period as the start date of the event.
  This means that the start date of events based on a holiday calendar can be in the period where the holiday occurs, or in the subsequent period. This can shift depending on the year or periodicity of the event. This is especially relevant for moving holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, for example.
BRFplus function
For more information, see Creating BRFplus Functions.

You can assign event types to event catalogs to group them into semantically consistent collections. You can also organize event catalogs in a hierarchy, for example:

US events (event catalog)
- US public holidays (event catalog)
  - Thanksgiving (event type)

Planning processes take event catalogs as input, and consider events of event types that are contained in the input catalogs. The planning processes that can be configured to consider event types and event catalogs are univariate forecasting, outlier detection, and interactive demand planning.

You can work with events as follows:

You define, edit and delete events, event types and event catalogs.
For more information, see Demand Planning Worklist.
You configure how you want the system to detect events, and estimate future events. You specify the planning level on which you want the system to detect events, and assign event catalogs to planning areas.
In Customizing for Advanced Planning and Optimization, choose Supply Chain Planning Demand Planning (DP) Basic Settings Events and Outliers Configure Outlier Detection and Event Catalog Assignments .
You run the Automatic Outlier Detection and Event Generation report, on the SAP Easy Access screen, under Advanced Planning and Optimization Demand Planning Planning Promotion Automatic Outlier Detection and Event Generation .
For more information, see Automatic Outlier Detection and Event Generation.
You can display the events the report created in interactive demand planning, as well as create new events and delete existing ones if you specify the planning level on which you ran the Automatic Outlier Detection and Event Generation report, and have created an auxiliary key figure to store the events in.
You can use the Mass Maintenance of Events report to create an event with the same parameters for multiple planning objects. On the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Advanced Planning and Optimization Demand Planning Planning Promotion Mass Creation of Events . For more information, see Mass Creation of Events.
You can delete events and event types. For more information, see Deletion of Events and Event Types.

To use this function, you must activate the business function SCM-APO-FCS, Events and Outliers, Causals, ABC/XYZ Classification (SCM_APO_FORECASTING_1). For more information, see SCM-APO-FCS, Events and Outliers, Causals, ABC/XYZ Classification.

Business Add-In for the Handling of Events

You can use the Business Add-In (BAdI) BAdI: Modification of the Determined Event Type During Outlier Detection in Customizing for Advanced Planning and Optimization, under Start of the navigation path Supply Chain Planning Next navigation step Demand Planning (DP) Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) Event Handling End of the navigation path to assign an event type to a certain period and characteristic value combination during Automatic Outlier Detection and Event Generation.