Requirement Prioritization 

Purpose

This function enables you to prioritize requirements according to their urgency, in order that key requirements can be covered even in bottleneck situations. With the aid of requirement prioritization, you control the sequence in which material requisitions are serviced right through the entire supply chain. The goal is to shorten lead times from the creation of the material requisition through to the availability of the goods supplied.

Prerequisites

You have activated requirement prioritization in Customizing for Materials Management under General Settings for Materials Management ® Requirement Prioritization and defined the corresponding priorities and their dependencies.

For more information, refer to the Implementation Guide (IMG) for Requirement Prioritization, especially under Define Prioritizations.

Scope of Functions

You can use requirement prioritization in the purchasing and reservation processes. You assign a requirement urgency at item level in purchasing and reservation documents. You have consolidated different requirement urgencies to form requirement urgency groups and have defined organizational priorities In Customizing. The system determines the requirement priority as the overall priority of a material requisition from the combination of requirement urgency group and organizational priority, This is displayed at item level in purchase requisitions, purchase orders, and reservations.

The definition of organizational priorities in Customizing is optional and allows you to specify further factors on which requirement priority is to depend. Such factors can include plants and storage locations (standard SAP setting) or selected fields at header and item levels of your purchasing and reservation documents (Business Add-In). You can also specify in Customizing that requirement priority is to be determined exclusively in dependence on the requirement urgency group.
For more information, refer to the IMG for Materials Management under General Settings for Materials Management ® Requirement Prioritization ® Define Organizational Priorities.

In the case of purchase orders, the requirement priority is converted into a delivery priority taking the requirement urgency into account and thus taken into account in deliveries. The delivery priority determined is displayed at item detail level (Shipping tab page) in purchase orders.

In orders, you can assign an order priority at document header level. You assign the order priority to the individual requirement urgencies in Customizing depending on the order type. The system determines the corresponding requirement urgency and priority for each reservation item that is created when an order is saved on the basis of this assignment.

Activities

You can use requirement prioritization in the purchasing and reservation processes.

Purchase requisitions

When creating and changing purchase requisitions, you can assign the requirement urgency at item detail level and have the system display the requirement priority it has determined (Source of Supply tab page).

Purchase order

·        You can select requisitions according to their requirement priority when creating POs via the assignment list and during automatic PO creation. In the process, the requirement urgency and priority are adopted in the purchase order. Conversion only takes place if sufficient stock is determined at the issuing storage location in the course of the availability check.

·        When you create a purchase order without reference to a requisition or change a purchase order, you can assign the requirement urgency at item level and have the system display the requirement priority it has determined.

·        Provided that you have made the relevant assignments in Customizing, the requirement urgency and priority are converted into the delivery priority in purchase orders. If you have not defined an assignment in Customizing, the system determines the value for the delivery priority from the customer-material info record or the creditor master record as standard. You can view the delivery priority determined on the Shipping tab page.

·        The requirement urgency and priority are displayed in individual overview lists of purchase orders.

Reservation

·         When creating and changing reservations, you can assign the requirement urgency at item level and have the system display the requirement priority it has determined.

·         If an associated reservation is automatically generated when an order is created, the system assigns a requirement urgency and a requirement priority to each reservation item. The system determines the prioritization on the basis of the Customizing settings for Requirement Prioritization (Assign Order Priorities).

·         Requirement urgency and requirement priority are taken into account in the reservation list as selection and output fields. This also applies to the requirement priority in the picking list.

Material requirements planning

·         Requirement prioritization impacts the external procurement process via requirement urgencies and priorities in purchase requisitions and reservations. On the requirements side there is no prioritization. The requirement prioritization is not taken into account in the MRP run.

·         A subsequent change in priorities does not lead to renewed MRP for the affected requirements.

·         The requirement priority determined for purchasing and reservation documents is displayed in the stock/requirements list, in the planning result, and in the MRP list. However, the requirement priority is not displayed in the order report or the pegged requirements display.