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 Sales Order Oriented Planning

Purpose

In this process you can on the one hand plan requirements for a product at an individual customer level. On the other hand production can only be triggered, if sales orders from the same customer exist for the product. The sales order consumes the forecast. Only the amount that the customer actually orders is produced.

This process has the advantage that you can plan requirements before the customer orders, ensuring that production facilities can plan efficiently. At the same time you make sure that only those materials are produced that are actually required.

Prerequisites

You have defined:

  • The products you want to work with

  • The locations you want to work with

In general the products (materials) and locations (plants) are created in SAP R/3. See Settings in the R/3 Material Master for details of the settings that are required in the R/3 material master to ensure that this process runs correctly. However you also need to make some settings in the APO product master (see Settings in the APO Product Master ).

You have created an integration model (APO Core Interface -CIF) that includes the products and locations as well as sales orders for the products and locations. For details on how to create, edit and activate integration models, see Integration Model .

You have created a Consumption Group and assigned it to the product in the location-specific view.

It is also essential that dynamic pegging is active. Otherwise the heuristics that are required do not run. For more details see Deactivation of Dynamic Pegging .

Process Flow

  1. In Demand Planning you create a planning area and book that contain characteristics for

  • Product

  • Location

  • Customer

You may also want to create key figures for the quantity for which sales orders have been issued.

  1. You create the Demand Plan. For more details refer to the SAP Library for the Demand Planning Process .

  2. You release the Demand Plan to SNP/PP-DS. For more details see Release of the Demand Plan to SNP . The system creates planned independent requirements.

  3. You create planned orders or purchase requisitions. Generally you do this in a planning run (see Production Planning Run ) but you can also use Interactive Planning . At this stage dependent requirements are also generated (providing you have made the requisite settings).

  4. You ask the customer to confirm the forecast by issuing purchase orders.

  5. You enter these purchase orders in the system as sales orders.

  6. These sales orders automatically consume the forecast. You can use the Ascertain heuristic in PP/DS to determine the open planned independent requirements for the selected end product, that is those planned independent requirements that have not been assigned to and consumed by a sales order. You can then remind the customer to place their order.

  7. At this stage the system may start another planning run, to generate receipts for new sales orders. This depends on the PP/DS settings you have made for the product and how the system should react to shortages.

  8. After the end of this period, you delete or reduce the superfluous planned independent requirements using one of two heuristics, Reorganize or Reorganize via products . The dependent requirements that were generated are also deleted. For more details on the heuristics, see the online documentation for these heuristics in Customizing for PP/DS ( Start of the navigation path Heuristics Next navigation step Maintain Heuristics). End of the navigation path

  9. The system now converts the planned orders / purchase requisitions to production orders / purchase orders in the OLTP system (SAP R/3). The conversion rule prevents any planned orders for which a sales order does not exist from being converted. (These planned orders should not exist, since they were deleted by the heuristic in the previous step.) For more details, see Conversion Checks .