Prioritization of Customer Demands and Demands with High Volume 

Use

During optimization-based planning in Supply Network Planning (SNP), you can prioritize customer demands and demands with high volume. In this way, you can ensure, for example, that demands from important customers or from customers with a high service level are covered by the SNP optimizer first.

Since the SNP optimizer searches on the basis of costs for the solution with the lowest costs, you can influence the prioritization of demands by assigning correspondingly high penalty costs for non-delivery or delay to the customer demands and to the demands with high volume. These demands are then prioritized by the SNP optimizer. If you want to create a profit-oriented plan that considers both the costs and the revenue, you can specify the actual prices of the products as the penalty costs for non-delivery of the products.

Moreover, the SNP optimizer can generate proposals for capacity reservation in Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS). In this way, the demands that you prioritized in the SNP optimizer can be planned as priority in PP/DS too.

Prerequisites

In order that the SNP optimizer can prioritize customer demands and generate proposals for capacity reservation, the following prerequisites must have been met:

●      You have created penalty cost groups.

●      To do so, on the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Advanced Planning and Optimization → Master Data → Application-Specific Master Data → Supply Network Planning → Define Penalty Cost Group.

You can use penalty cost groups to group demands so that you can assign penalty costs to them.

●      You have used BAdI /SAPAPO/SDP_RELDATA to assign the penalty cost groups to forecasts or to sales orders. To do so, in Customizing for Demand Planning (DP), choose Business-Add-Ins (BAdIs) → Release SNP/DP → Change Data During Release to SNP or R/3. For more information, see the Implementation Guide (IMG).

●      You have released the forecast from DP to SNP by specifying descriptive characteristics such as Customer in a consumption group. For more information, see the documentation for DP under Release of the Demand Plan to SNP.

Alternatively, you can use Core Interface (CIF) to transfer sales orders from SAP ERP to SAP SCM. For more information, see the documentation for integration via Core Interface under Integration of Orders.

●      On the SNP 1 tab page in the product master data, you have assigned penalty costs for non-delivery and for delay to the penalty cost groups. This makes the penalty costs customer-specific, for example.

If you specify the actual prices as the penalty costs for non-delivery, you must have activated Profit Maximization on the Solution Methods tab page in the SNP optimizer profile.

In order that the SNP optimizer can prioritize demands with high volume, the following prerequisites must have been met:

●      You have defined a profile for quantity-based penalty costs (quantity profile) in the application-specific master data. To do so, on the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Advanced Planning and Optimization → Master Data → Application-Specific Master Data → Supply Network Planning → Define Profile for Quantity-Based Penalty Costs.

You define quantity intervals in the profile and assign them to penalty costs. You always enter the lower bound of the interval only. The upper bound is defined by the lower bound of the next interval. The lower bound of the first interval is always 0 and cannot be changed. The upper bound of the last interval is infinite.

Changes to the profile are valid for the next SNP optimization run.

●      You have assigned the quantity profile to the product and to certain demand types on the SNP 1 tab page in the product master data. You can assign the profile in a time-dependent way or in a time-independent way.

You can also specify the profile for certain penalty cost groups (see above) and thereby assign the quantity-based penalty costs to certain customer demands. In this case, the prerequisites described above for the prioritization of customer demands must also be met. If you do not specify a penalty cost group (or you specify group 000), the quantity-based penalty costs are valid for the relevant demand type.

Activities

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Prioritization of Customer Demands

You perform one or more consecutive optimization runs by creating a penalty cost group profile for the demands to be prioritized in the next run and by specifying this profile for the next run. For more information, see Penalty Cost Group Profile as well as Running the Optimizer from the Interactive Planning Desktop and Running the Optimizer in the Background.

Prioritization of Demands with High Volume

You have the following options:

●      If you want to prioritize demands with high volume, you perform an optimization run for which you have assigned a quantity profile to the products and demand types as described above.

●      If you want to prioritize demands with high volume in a customer-specific way, you perform one or more optimization runs for which you have assigned a quantity profile to the products, demand types, and penalty cost groups, as described above, and for which you have specified a penalty cost group profile for the optimization run.

Result

The result of these optimization runs is a production and distribution plan that covers the demands according to their priority and that takes into account all capacity constraints. However, it can be the case that demands cannot be covered.

Based on the optimization results, the SNP optimizer generates proposals for capacity reservation in PP/DS that you can release in PP/DS. In PP/DS, you can reserve capacity on the level of product, bucket, and descriptive characteristic. For more information, see the documentation for Capable-to-Promise (CTP) in PP/DS under Capacity Reservation.