Monitoring and Solving Planning Problems Using the Alert Monitor 

Purpose

In the Alert Monitor, the system displays the alerts that occur in the current planning situation. In the Alert Monitor Window, you can process the alerts or forward them to another planner. You can go from the Alert Monitor window directly to the relevant application in order to resolve the problem that caused the alert.

Prerequisites

Before you can use the Alert Monitor, you must make the following settings:

·        You define Application-Specific Alert Profiles.

·        If you want to call the Alert Monitor directly from the area menu for Supply Chain Monitoring, you must also

¡        Define an Overall Alert Profile.

¡        Include all overall alert profiles relevant to you in your Favorites or be named as substitute for an overall alert profile by another user.

·        If you want to use the Alert Monitor within the Supply Chain Cockpit (SCC), you must assign application-specific alert profiles to your SCC User Profile.

·        If you want to call the Alert Monitor from an application, enter an alert profile in the application.

Process Flow

During interactive planning in an application using the Alert Monitor, you recognize that alerts have been created, or you are informed of existing alerts by the system or another planner.

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       1.      You call the Alert Monitor directly, in the SCC or from an application.

       2.      If you call the Alert Monitor directly, choose from your favorites the overall alert profile that you want to see for the planning. If you have been named as substitute for an overall alert profile from another planner, choose Adopt substitutions.

From the initial screen, when you call the Alert Monitor directly, you can also define and change overall alert profiles, application-specific alert profiles, favorites, and substitutions.

       3.      In the view selection, you choose whether the system displays all alerts for an object category (for example, location product) or all alerts for a certain alert type.

You can only select views for which alerts exist. If no alerts exist for the objects you selected in the alert profiles, the view selection is empty.

       4.      In the object selection, you select the objects for which you want to see alerts. Here too, the system only displays objects for which alerts exist.

       5.      In the display area, the system generates a list of all existing alerts.

       6.      You can use the following functions to remove from your display any alerts that you no longer want to see.

If you use the Alert Monitor as a subscreen of the Product Planning Table, you can only access these functions using the context menu.

¡        Deleting alerts from the database

You can only delete alerts that have been saved to the database. PP/DS alerts and dynamic macro-dependent alerts are not saved in the database. They are determined from the SAP liveCache at runtime. These alerts are only removed from the Alert Monitor display when the problem has been resolved.

Choose the  Delete button or use the context menu to delete individual alerts. Choose Goto →Delete Alerts to access a selection screen where you can select more than one alert for simultaneous deletion.

SAP recommends deleting any alerts that you cannot or do not want to resolve regularly from the database.

¡         Hide

If you have hidden alerts, the  Show button is visible. You can choose this button to show hidden alerts again.

¡         Forward

You can forward alerts to another system user. Forwarded alerts are flagged in the recipients display with the  symbol. The system also tells the recipient who forwarded the alert and when.

       7.      You can flag alerts that you have already noted with  , or you can remove the flag  .

The system interprets any alerts that you assigned the status Hidden, Forwarded, or Noted as confirmed. You use the Set/Get parameter /SAPAPO/ASTAT_DAYS to specify how many days an alert retains its assigned status. If, for example, you enter the value 14 here, the system will automatically display any hidden alerts again after two weeks.

       8.      Before you change the planning again, you can use the  Freezefunction to set that all currently displayed alerts should continue to be displayed.

If you now make changes to the planning and refresh the Alert Monitor display, the system compares the newly determined alerts with the “frozen” list. The system flags all new alerts with a plus sign  , and all alerts that have been resolved in the meantime with a minus sign  .

If you remove the Freeze with  and refresh the screen, the Alert Monitor displays only alerts that are still current.

       9.      If there is a descriptive text for the alert type for this alert, you can call up the text using the context menu. Go to the relevant application and resolve the problem, or notify the appropriate planner, for example by email, who can then improve the planning.

 

The following diagram outlines one possible way of working using the Alert Monitor during planning.

Result

When you finish working with the Alert Monitor, the Alert Monitor window should not contain any unconfirmed alerts.