You use Demand Planning (DP) to create a forecast of market demand for your company's products. This allows you to consider the many different causal factors that affect demand. The result of Demand Planning is the demand plan.

You can transfer the demand plan to Supply Network Planning (SNP) or Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS). You use these applications to plan how to cover the transferred planned independent requirements and to create procurement proposals for in-house production or external procurement. In SNP you execute aggregate, medium-term planning and in PP/DS you execute detailed, short-term planning. For more information, see Integrating SNP and PP/DS.

DP can execute demand planning specifically for certain customers and transfer the planned independent requirements to PP/DS. For sales order oriented planning that is based on a make-to-stock production strategy, you only convert the planned orders or purchase requisitions created for planned independent requirements into production orders or purchase orders, if these orders are used exclusively to cover sales orders. Superfluous planned independent requirements are deleted. Production and purchasing are only triggered if there are consumers for the products. There are special heuristics in PP/DS to support this process. You use this heuristics to