Descriptive Characteristics in Production
Planning
Definition
See descriptive characteristic.
Use
The main use of
descriptive characteristics in production planning is to plan at customer
level in both Demand Planning and Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling
(PP/DS). For more information, see Descriptive
Characteristics and
Use of Descriptive
Characteristics.
Due to this focus on the customer, it makes no sense to use descriptive characteristics in a pure make-to-stock scenario, such as in the standard requirements strategy 10. This would lead to serious inconsistencies in inventory management.
Forecasts - Requirements
When you release a demand plan with descriptive characteristics to order LiveCache, the system creates an order of the requisite category, usually independent requirements, for each value of the descriptive characteristics. For example if you plan demand at customer level and have 20 customers for which you wish to plan production, for each time bucket in DP the system creates 20 forecast orders (instead of only one if you do not use descriptive characteristics).
This example makes it clear why you should use descriptive characteristics very restrictively. If you use only two descriptive characteristics in a planning book and each characteristic has only 20 values, the system creates 400 orders. If you use three characteristics 8000 orders are produced. The consequences for performance are obvious.
In interactive Production
Planning the forecasts to which descriptive characteristics have been assigned
are depicted by an 
icon. If you double-click on this icon, the
values of the descriptive characteristics appear in a dialog box.
Sales Orders
In general sales
orders are created in SAP
R/3 and then transferred using the core interface (CIF) to SAP
APO (see
Integration Model
and
Sales
orders). If the consumption group contains fields that are present in
sales orders, the sales order is displayed in interactive Production Planning
with an icon. If
you double-click on this icon, the values of the descriptive characteristics
appear in a dialog box.
Planned Orders
If capacity reservations are maintained on the resource, the descriptive characteristic values for the orders are evaluated during planning; the scheduling considers these capacity reservations. The planned order uses the descriptive characteristic values of the requirement it covers.
Dependent Requirements
You can propagate the descriptive characteristic values to the dependent requirements in the procurement planning and CTP scenarios. This propagation occurs only if the relevant indicator has been selected in Global Customizing (/SAPAPO/RRPCUST1) at the client level or in the Product Master at product level. The descriptive characteristic values for dependent requirements are evaluated using the values of all characteristics for the primary requirement as well as the location/product for the dependent requirement.
Pegging in LiveCache is not based on descriptive characteristic values. Therefore after a change in pegging, the descriptive characteristic values at the dependent requirement may not match those of the primary requirement to which it is pegged. In such a case, you can trigger a fresh propagation of descriptive characteristic values based on the new pegging values using heuristic SAP_PP_023.
Deliveries
Deliveries are created in SAP R/3 for a sales order. You can transfer deliveries to SAP APO by including them in the integration model. In SAP APO they receive the descriptive characteristics of the sales order and can reduce the sales order.
If a delivery exists in SAP APO that is no longer assigned to a sales order, and an initial data supply is initiated for the integration model, the descriptive characteristics for the delivery may be lost. This could cause inconsistencies in inventory management.
See also: