Notes Management

Use

Use notes to remind yourself or inform other demand planners of the reasons why the demand forecast in a particular period at a particular level is as low or high as it is.

Features

Notes are planning area specific. This means that if you create a note for a key figure and time bucket in one planning area, you can see this note in all planning books in this planning area provided the same key figures and time buckets exist in the planning books.

The notes management screen area has a status bar and a toolbar.

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

Status Bar

The status bar is visible when you open the notes management screen area.

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

Toolbar

Note Overview

You can call up an overview of all the notes in the planning area. you can do so either

From planning area administration by choosing Goto → Notes Overview

By starting transaction /SAPAPO/SDP_NOTES.

You can further restrict the selection to individual key figures or versions. In the notes overview you cannot change notes.

Activities

To	Do this
Open the notes management screen area with the status bar	Click on a cell with the right mouse button and choose Display note . The key figure and period to which the note relates are shown at the top of the editing area.
Show the notes management toolbar	Choose View → Show/hide toolbar from the status bar.
Write a note	Click on the cell with the right mouse button and choose Display note . Write your note. Save your note by choosing on the status bar. The note is saved for the period on the level at which you created it.
Drill down from a high level to a note written at a lower level Do this, for example, if you are a demand planner working on a high level (e.g. regional level) and you wish to see the explanation for a forecast made by another planner at a lower level (e.g. product level).	Choose Display note hierarchy from the status bar. The key figure and period to which the note relates are shown in the attribute column of the hierarchy area. In the hierarchy area of the screen, choose from the Choose charact. pull-down menu the characteristic to whose note level you want to drill down. (Scroll across the screen to see the characteristic values.) To display the note for a characteristic value, click on its icon . To drill down to another level, double-click on the drill-down icon and choose another characteristic from the pull-down menu. A red traffic light beside a characteristic value indicates that you cannot drill down any further.
Download a note to your hard disk	Display the note. From the toolbar, choose Save as local file . Save the file with the extension .txt.
Upload a file as a note from your hard disk	From the toolbar, choose Load local file .

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

If you select several values of a characteristic in the shuffler and load the data for this selection, it is not possible to create notes for the sum/aggregate value of the individual values. You can only create notes for the individual values. Similarly if after loading the multiple selection you then drill down on another characteristic, you cannot create notes for the individual values. There can only be one value for each characteristic in a selection. Characteristics

For example in the shuffler you select location 0001 and 0002, and load the data. If you then try to write a note for a key figure and time bucket, the note area appears in read-only. If you drill down in the grid on location 0001, you can create a note. When you now drill up again and then drill-down on product, you cannot create notes for products that exist in both locations. (For products that only exist in one location the selection is unambigous and therefore a note can be created.)