Considering Shelf Life Data in SNP 

Purpose

For perishable products, such as consumer goods or pharmaceuticals, it is important for the planner to know whether they can be used to satisfy given demands at a certain point in time. For this reason, stocks, receipts, and demands of such products can carry shelf life data.

Stocks and receipts (for example, stock transfers) can carry information about their shelf life, that is, the period between production and expiration. Demands (for example, sales orders) can carry information about shelf life requirements that have to be met.

Planning applications in Supply Network Planning (SNP) do not consider shelf life data, with the exception of the SNP optimizer that considers shelf life in a restricted way. For more information, see Stock Planning.

However, you can propagate shelf life data of demands along the supply chain to set the shelf life data of orders created by planning. After propagation, an alert function enables you to identify mismatches between shelf life requirements and actual shelf life, as well as product quantities that are about to expire.

Prerequisites

●      You have checked that the Plng with Shelf Life indicator in the product master on the Properties tab page is set to enable the shelf life function. The system sets this indicator automatically when transferring product master data with shelf life from SAP ERP.

●      You have specified the shelf life data in the product master on the Properties tab page. The Shelf Life and Req.Min.Sh.Life fields are automatically filled from SAP ERP.

●      You have made sure that the Deactivate Dynamic Pegging indicator in the location product master on the Demand tab page is not set.

●      You have defined a shelf life profile. For more information, see Shelf Life Profile.

●      You have set up the transfer of sales orders and stocks with shelf life data from SAP ERP. For more information, see Integration.

Process Flow

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       1.      You execute an SNP heuristic or optimization run. For more information, see Supply Network Planning Run.

       2.      You run shelf life propagation. For more information, see Shelf Life Propagation.

       3.      You check the results of shelf life propagation in interactive Supply Network Planning. You can also run alert macros to generate shelf life alerts For more information, see Display of Shelf Life Data.