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 Gross Requirements Planning (11)

Purpose

The make-to-stock strategy gross requirements planning is particularly useful in mass production environments; it is often combined with repetitive manufacturing. This strategy is particularly useful if you need to produce, regardless of whether you have stock or not. For instance, steel or cement producers might want to use this strategy because they cannot shut down production; a blast furnace or a cement factory must continue to produce, even if this means having to produce to stock.

This strategy is also frequently used if there is a Material Requirements Planning system in a legacy system that needs to be linked to an SAP system which serves as a production execution system. The legacy system calculates a specific production plan, which has to be executed, regardless of the stock situation in the SAP system.

Examples from Industry

Heavy-duty industries such as steel manufacturing (blast furnace) and the cement industry.

Prerequisites

You need to maintain the following master data for the finished product:

  • Maintain strategy group 11 on the MRP screen.

  • Set the Mixed MRP indicator to 2 on the MRP screen.

  • Maintain the item category group (for example, NORM ) on the Sales Organization screen.

  • Maintain the Availability check field so that you perform an availability check without the replenishment lead time (checking group 02 in the standard system). For more details, see the Other Areas section in Production by Lot Size (30) .

Process Flow

For a detailed example of the entire process, see Sample Scenario: Strategy 11 .

This planning strategy is to some extent similar to Net Requirements Planning (10) . However, the following differences exist:

Strategy

10

11

Stock is taken into account

Yes

No

Reduction of planned independent requirements takes place during …

… goods issue for the delivery

... goods receipt for a production order (discrete production), for a planned order (repetitive manufacturing), or for a purchase order (trading goods).

Gross requirements planning also has the following features in common with net requirements planning (10):

  • Production quantities can be planned relatively effectively by means of planned independent requirements. It is possible to use information from the Sales Information System, flexible planning, or other planning tools to plan production quantities. This means that production and procurement of the required components is triggered before the sales order stage.

  • Individual sales orders, which can be somewhat irregular, do not affect production.

  • An accurate availability check is performed according to ATP logic during sales order processing.

  • It is possible to perform a lot size "optimization" during planning so that you always plan convenient lot sizes in Demand Management or during the MRP run using lot size and/or rounding keys.

Other Areas

Availability Check

You must work with an availability check that checks without checking the replenishment lead time. See Availability Check .