Advanced Planning and Optimization (SCM-APO)

A plan describes the work processes and components involved in the manufacture of a product (or - in the manufacture of co-products - several products) on a non-order-specific basis.

Key elements of a plan are:

• The worksteps (activities) necessary to manufacture the product
• The resources needed to carry out the activities
• The temporal relationships between the activities
• The components needed to manufacture the product

To determine which plan is used to manufacture a product, a production process model (PPM) is generated for the plan.

The bill of materials and the routing (or the recipe) from the R/3 or ERP system correspond to the plan in SAP SCM.

To avoid confusion, in this context the "plan" is also often referred to more precisely as the "PPM plan".